Larry Frolick is the brother of Vernon Frolick, author of the bestselling Fire into Ice, a biography of entrepreneurial geologist Chuck Fipke, the man who discovered Canada’s northern diamond deposits. Larry Frolick’s Ten Thousand Scorpions begins where his brother’s book left off, with Fipke now searching for precious metals in Yemen.

What Fipke and his crew found was far more interesting: a system of ancient mine tunnels that may have been the source of the fabled Queen of Sheba’s gold. Fascinated by the persistence of stories in the Koran and Bible and local folklores about the Queen, Frolick goes on his own expedition to discover the truth behind the legends. The reader travels to such unusual destinations as the 3,000 year-old dam at Ma’rib and the Rastafarian communities scattered over the Ethiopian highlands.

The Queen of Sheba, supposedly the trigger for Frolick’s journeys, remains a shadowy presence, though. She is never evoked strongly enough to give Ten Thousand Scorpions any sense of internal coherence, resulting in a book that often reads like a series of weakly connected episodes. Some of these episodes are fascinating, such as Frolick’s thoughts on the evolution exhibit in Addis Ababa, but too many are simply an attempt to invest the mundane with a sense of majesty.

This results in many instances of overwriting – Frolick describes people “congealing in bus shelters, half-blinded by the effluvium of winter” – and such strained analogies as comparing the outline of Yemen to a Tyrannosaurus Rex. However interesting the individual elements are, Frolick’s Queen of Sheba cannot hold them together on her own.