Pro­fes­sor David Shep­herd is a trou­bled man. A child­hood acci­dent has come back to haunt him and he finds him­self writ­ing names of peo­ple he does not know and real­iz­ing that they are sig­nif­i­cant in some way. Vis­its to a ther­a­pist and Has­sidic rab­bi in Brook­lyn help him dis­cov­er that he has a copy of The Book of Names. Accord­ing to Kab­bal­ah, Adam wrote down the names of the Lamed Vavniks, the thir­ty-six right­eous souls who keep the world intact. If all of them were to die, the world would end. The cur­rent gen­er­a­tion of Lamed Vavniks is rapid­ly per­ish­ing of unnat­ur­al caus­es. As they die, the world becomes unsta­ble, rav­aged by war and nat­ur­al dis­as­ter. David, assist­ed by a beau­ti­ful Israeli schol­ar, bat­tles the Gnoseos, a secret reli­gious cult with plans to take over the world once the right­eous dis­ap­pear. They must save the remain­ing Lamed Vavniks before it is too late. 

This lat­est DaVin­ci Code clone is not par­tic­u­lar­ly excit­ing. The char­ac­ters are oned­i­men­sion­al and the plot is trite. Pub­lic libraries with an audi­ence for this type of mate­r­i­al may con­sid­er The Book of Names, but aca­d­e­m­ic and syn­a­gogue libraries do not need it.