I guess it’s time to admit defeat: apparently “Have you tried Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum?” is not a good enough suggestion for bookstore customers looking for “something like The Da Vinci Code.”

Thankfully, two new novels by Canadian writers have appeared that should prove more welcoming to readers seeking dark conspiracies in the musty corners of history. Both David Gibbins’ The Last Gospel and Michael Slade’s Crucified are exceedingly reader-friendly, historically focused, conspiracy-driven novels, although they differ in approach and result.

Michael Slade is actually the pen name for a Vancouver conglomerate that has included five separate writers over the past two decades. For this new book, Slade moves away from his popular, splattery Special X psycho thriller series, introducing both a new set of characters and a shift in sensibilities.

Crucified begins with the discovery of a Second World War Allied bomber, the Ace of Clubs, in contemporary Germany. Liz Hannah, the granddaughter of the ill-fated pilot, attempts to hire historian and bestselling author Wyatt Rook to investigate the plane’s disappearance and discovery. Why was the plane so far off course during what should have been a routine bombing run? Was it part of the plot to rescue Judas, the high-ranking member of the Third Reich who betrayed Hitler? Rook accepts the job, and together he and Hannah are drawn into a mystery with roots that go 2,000 years deep, to the day of Christ’s crucifixion. As one might expect, their investigations are noticed by the Secret Inquisition of the Catholic Church, which sends out a Legionary of Christ to foil the intrepid pair.

While a lot of these elements are a little familiar – honestly, how many of these uber-secret Vatican offices can there be? – Slade handles them with aplomb. The novel unfolds with effortless readability, despite the fact that it ranges over two millennia and incorporates aspects of the Crusades, Satanism, the witch hunts, and the routine lives of airmen. As one might expect with a Slade novel, there are twists aplenty, scenes of gruesome torture and murder (with Inquisition tools, of course), and a series of small mysteries leading up to the larger mystery at the centre of the book. It’s refreshing to see Slade working with a new cast of characters. With the secrets of his past, one can imagine Wyatt Rook anchoring a new series of novels in his own right.

Less enticing is the work of David Gibbins, a writer and underwater archaeologist who splits his time between Canada and the U.K. and has developed a large following overseas for his historical thrillers featuring – wait for it – underwater archaeologist Jack Howard. All the usual pieces are in place in The Last Gospel: a series of Biblical mysteries, the eruption of Pompeii, the fall of the Roman Empire, a 2,000-year-old document that could rock the very foundations of Christianity, a dark, Church-affiliated force that will stop at nothing to safeguard these secrets, action sequences set in subterranean Roman ruins and under the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. With elements like these, and an outsize dramatic sensibility that would make both Dan Brown and Clive Cussler blush, what’s not to like?

Well, the writing, for starters. And the pacing. And the sheer mannered ridiculousness of the dialogue. The Last Gospel is a bit of a mess. The book lurches from set piece to set piece, propelled by authorial intervention that borders on the ridiculous. Need a plane? Hey, we’ve got a plane! Need someone to extrapolate ad nauseam about historical minutiae? Hey, a minor character’s been researching that very thing! Coincidences abound, and conclusions are jumped to so quickly that one wonders if the characters have been reading the historical scenes Gibbins includes.

No one talks in The Last Gospel; the dialogue (and I use that term loosely) instead offers page after page of canned mini-lectures that serve primarily to grease the creaking wheels of the plot.

And yet, all that being said, the book remains compulsively readable. Both Crucified and The Last Gospel are single-sitting books, the sort of novels one devours rather than pores over. Crucified, though, leaves one wanting more, while The Last Gospel is the equivalent of eating an entire bag of potato chips in a single sitting: you know it’s bad for you, but you can’t stop yourself, and you come away feeling more than a little ill when you’re done.

Which, I suppose, means we’ve finally found two worthy successors to The Da Vinci Code.