One can imagine smoke rising from Michael Drosnin's lap-top after the People's Princess ((c) T. Blair) so thrillingly pancaked into that Parisian tunnel wall. On it are a Hebrew Bible and Israeli mathematician Eliyahu Rip's counting algorithm. Because, perhaps rather inevitably, behind all that Son of God schtick lurks a secret text: prophetic words portending to events in the modern world. Verily have we found "The Sealed Book" mooted for the "End of Days".

Sceptical? So was Drosnin. "There's no one who would be harder to persuade this is real than me." And yet within pages he's jetting off to tell the unfortunate Yitzhak Rabin of a plot against his life. Still, think of the Air Miles. "I think there is only one answer," he's soon soberly quoting Rips. "That God exists."

Thus the book reveals the dreadful truth of the Holocaust, various assassinations and the Oklahoma bomb. Always what has happened, you'll see, like an archaeological tabloid. And, when his few predictions fail to come true (like endless warnings about "atomic holocaust"), Drosnin manfully concludes that these are not so much predictions as probabilities. Quite why the Big Guy ever encoded this guff in the first place - and in language so stilted even the Teletubbies wouldn't break a sweat - is never explained.

Taken at face value The Bible Code is just more 2000-ist cash-in crap. Flatten the globe, burn a witch and decode God's secret word. It's all there. But maybe there is more. Just stop and think for a minute: Rabin, the Holocaust, threats to Jerusalem...

You can wrap it in New Science all you like, but this is church screed by any other name, even pro-Israeli propaganda, with Drosnin extrapolating a few meaningless Nostradamusisms as proof "that Kaddafi would buy an atomic device, and that Libyan-backed terrorists would use it against Israel." Noticeably, Rips has since stated: "I did not do joint work with [Drosnin]....I do not support [his] work...nor the conclusions he derives." No doubt that'll be in the paperback.

In the meantime, Drosnin's charging twenty of your English pounds for this millenialist toss - no mean feat given he reads like Jackie Collins. Thank somebody for a HUGE typeface, copious - if utterly unintelligible - illustrations, and a cod-science paper clearly not there to be read. The result is more tumid pamphlet than scholarly text, written by the cynical for the terminally gullible. And worse yet, Drosnin doesn't even let us in on the current whereabouts of Elvis. Tragic.