Fay Rae Lambers is a shy, inexperienced calculus professor. She was the victim of sexual abuse as a teenager, and she currently suffers from chronic rheumatoid arthritis that gives her constant pain. Due to those two things, Rae is a virgin and has no plans to ever change that.

On vacation in Egypt, Rae literally stumbles upon a gold box with a strange tarot deck inside. A guy in the bazaar reacts with terror when he sees it and tells her to throw it away. She doesn’t, but after getting one glimpse of a scary card – Typhon, the Devil – she displays inhuman restraint and wraps it up, never even looking at another card. (By the way, apparently the words “Typhon, the Devil” are written on the card in English. Rae never even wonders why there is English writing on these ancient cards.)

On the plane home from Egypt, Rae meets a magnetic, sexy foreigner named Simeon Avare. This guy has keeper written all over him. Simeon is gorgeous, mysterious, wealthy beyond your wildest dreams, and immediately begins lavishing attention and unconditional acceptance upon Rae. His touch not only makes Rae experience waves of desire, it also makes her pain go away. Are you not in love with him already? Simeon’s only apparent flaw is that he wears some sort of pomade in his hair, but I liked him so much I was willing to pretend I hadn’t read that.

Alas, I should have listened to the pomade: Simeon is the villain. To my extreme disappointment, I soon learned that the hero is some dude named Michael Gregory, with whom, due to a will stipulation, Rae will share a house. Michael is angry, bitter, rude, and married. Well, he’s in the process of getting a divorce, but still, he’s about as much fun to have around as a case of bronchitis. Once upon a time, though Michael was Rae’s First Teen Love until a truly humongous case of poor communication drove them apart back in high school.

I’m feeling pretty long-winded here, but I’m not finished summarizing. Rae has long been close friends with Michael’s father, Dr. Thomas Gregory, an eminent historian. When she returns from Egypt she discovers that Dr. Gregory has died, and that he bequeathed to Rae half of his Victorian mansion, hinting to her that some important thing is in the house and that she must find it (but not telling her what it is). Inconveniently, he bequeathed the other half of the house to his unpleasant son, Michael. Rae and Michael decide to live together platonically in the house.

Here’s where things get interesting. It seems that Dr. Gregory had a theory, which he e-mailed to Rae just before he died. For every action, he explains, there is an equal and opposite reaction. He immediately proceeds to demonstrate that he doesn’t know what that fundamental law of physics means by invoking such “opposites” as day vs. night, sun vs. moon, and scientific reason vs. crackpot mysticism – oh wait, that last one was mine. So, he goes on, for every Christian medieval group who was searching for the Holy Grail (!), there must have been a non-Christian medieval group, like the Illuminati or the Freemasons (!!), searching for the opposite of the Holy Grail: the Red Sword. Rae concludes that he got this stuff from the Rosicrucians, a group whose insignia is actually a cross with a rose on it, but somehow in this novel that translates to Red Sword. (Later, we learn that Dr. Gregory did once find a red sword, and then assembled his theory afterwards; which is not good reasoning, but … never mind).

Let’s all say it together: Oh puhleeez. Dr. Gregory does with baloney what Jackson Pollack did with paint. But this is fiction, right? I mean, the conspiracy in The Da Vinci Code wasn’t true either (no, really, it wasn’t), but even so the book was a pretty good read. Is this?

No. It makes no sense. It is full of plot holes and ridiculous leaps of logic. I found the wild paranormal conspiracy theories to be by far the best part of the book, even when the author drags in Old Testament revisionism, space aliens visiting on the Hale-Bopp comet, and humans who can reach the level of godhead by caring about no one but themselves. It’s ridiculous (and I could spend several dozen pages picking apart the historical and scientific underpinnings of this portion of the book, but I’ll spare you), but I have to admit it was not boring. I can’t say the same about the love story.

The author made a colossal mistake when she introduced the dazzling Simeon, and had Rae respond to him sexually before she introduced the hero. After a set-up like that, to throw Rae together with the obnoxious Michael – well, it just didn’t work for me. Simeon turns out to be not so nice after all, but Michael only gets slightly better. At the end of the book he’s still hot-tempered, quick to judge, and seems like he’d be a chore to get along with.

Rae is not much better. Her refusal to communicate is truly astounding. She never tells Michael about her arthritis – he has to learn about it from someone else, and all along he’s been accidentally hurting her because he didn’t know. Even when the love story between her and Michael heats up, she doesn’t actually break up with Simeon but lets him continue to come around. She doesn’t tell Michael what’s going on with Simeon or vice versa. Throughout the book she allows Michael to leap to his usual hasty conclusions, and then feels injured that he doesn’t understand. Between his judgmental anger and her passive-aggressive drippiness, well, these two have a long road ahead of them.

There are a couple of nice moments in the novel, most of them coming between Rae and her troubled sister. But there are some real head-scratchers, as well. There’s a scene in which a villainess blackmails Rae with a truly pathetic threat; anyone who gave it a second’s thought would have laughed in her face. Rae caves, of course, because this is a plot contrivance. There’s an ugly onscreen rape that seemed unnecessary and surprisingly brutal, especially considering the lite-n-cheesy tone of the rest of the novel.

You might conceivably enjoy The Dark Lord if you’re in the mood for a highly escapist read, but probably not. I like escapist fantasy, myself, but this was all just too much for me. To sum up: do not pick up The Dark Lord expecting any level of realism, including characters you can connect with or a plot that makes sense, unless you really like stinky cheese.