The Nephilim Seed
James Scott Bell
Broadman & Holman, 375 pages, $12.99

Nephilim:
The Truth is Here
L. A. Marzulli
Zondervan, 458 pages, $12.99

"The sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful and they married any of them they chose . …The Nephilim were on the earth in those days . …"—Genesis 6:1-4.

This passage preceding the flood account in the Bible's first book is as thought-provoking as it is difficult to understand. Redaction critics fight over its composition. Almost everybody has a pet theory for how to identify the "sons of God" and "daughters of men." And any talented novelist takes one look at the passage and says, "You know, there's a story buried in there somewhere."

The two most recent novelistic excavators to pick up spade and put their literary backs to it are James Scott Bell, who won the Christy Award for Final Witness, and L. A. Marzulli, who (the back cover of his novel assures us) "possess[es] an in-depth knowledge of the topic of UFO cults." Surprisingly, Marzulli's effort proves the more worthwhile.

The Nephilim Seed uses Genesis 6 as a springboard into a spirited polemic against Bell's sworn enemy, Darwinists. (Bell also wrote The Darwin Conspiracy, which was blurbed by none other than chief Darwin critic Phillip E. Johnson.)

The story begins with the murder of a prominent Intelligent Design theorist on the verge of exposing Harvard Professor Bentley Davis.

Davis plans to use nanotechnology to alter people and drown out the "God part" of their brains. When evangelical Christian/lawyer/single mother Janice Ramsey's daughter Lauren is abducted for experimentation by Davis's goons, Janice decides to fight back. She teams up with one-eyed private investigator Jed Brown (brother of the murdered ...