Maya Lin & the Ancient Order of Seshat: The ArQitect by J. Adrian Betancourt
Maya Lin has barely begun to mourn her father when someone tears through his immaculate Miami Beach home looking for a package her grandmother sent her. Inside is a gold medallion Maya cannot identify. The police officers who arrive seem unusually interested in it, too. Soon, the architectural historian flees across Biscayne Bay on a jet ski, still unsure what she has stumbled into.
J. Adrian Betancourt’s the arQitect begins with two deaths. Jing Qi Shen, founder of the enormously successful QiNIUS Corporation, collapses at the opening of a cancer center he funded. That same night, his friend and business partner Yang Lin—Maya’s father—dies of a heart attack. Jing’s son believes his father was murdered. Maya, meanwhile, throws herself into research on Ponce de León and the Fountain of Youth, a project that offers welcome distraction from her grief.
Her grandmother’s medallion pulls her into a different search. Maya learns that her grandparents belonged to the Ancient Order of Seshat, whose members have spent centuries hiding knowledge they believe could be disastrous in the wrong hands. Now a stolen scroll has reached QiNIUS. The company’s wearable QiNIE device was designed to help people meditate and work with Qi, or life energy. In the wrong hands, knowledge from the scroll could turn that device toward a far more sinister purpose.
The People Behind the Secrets
Maya makes an appealing guide through this crowded world because she has plenty to contend with before the chase begins. She misses both parents, struggles with anxiety and has spent much of her life feeling that she needs someone else to steady her. Early on, she sails into a storm to scatter her father’s ashes and must improvise a repair when her boat’s steering fails. It is a vivid scene in its own right, and it makes her later resourcefulness easier to believe.
Her companions bring their own histories to the pursuit. Zhen Waiy, Maya’s former Kung Fu teacher, has spent a lifetime developing abilities that QiNIUS hopes to exploit through technology. Cairo Muharib retrieves stolen cultural artifacts with a leopard named Cleo at her side. Teddy Adams helped build the QiNIE and wants no part of what the company’s new leadership intends to do with it. Ju Li, Maya’s ninety-year-old grandmother, proves particularly good at being overlooked by people who assume she poses no threat.
Betancourt also gives the villains more than a simple appetite for power. Zhi Zhu’s resentment of QiNIUS’s founders has a history, while her associate Pantu’s anger reaches back into Maya and Zhen’s lives. Their grievances do not excuse what they do, but they make the struggle over the scrolls personal as well as dangerous.
An Adventure That Enjoys Its Own Excesses
This is a novel happy to send its characters from a fight at Alcatraz to a puzzle in Coit Tower’s murals. QiNIUS headquarters is shaped like a yin-yang symbol; Teddy has built a small AI robot dragon; songs and movie references turn up wherever the party goes. Betancourt writes with obvious affection for these details. The story is at its liveliest when a location, a clue and the characters’ clashing temperaments all come into play at once.
That abundance has a cost. Explanations of the Order, the technology and the characters’ backstories sometimes interrupt the momentum, and the puns will delight some readers more than others. Yet the novel’s underlying question remains engaging: when does protecting knowledge become a duty, and who gets to decide when the world is ready for it?
For Maya, the question is no longer theoretical. the arQitect gives her an inheritance she never asked for, then lets her discover what she can do with it.
About J. Adrian Betancourt
J. Adrian Betancourt is the pen name of Javier Adrian Betancourt, a Miami-based writer, community leader, podcast host, publisher, producer and lifelong lover of stories that blend mystery, history, philosophy and adventure.
