The military orders have left their mark in the Levant in a truly spectacular fashion. Their castles are well known, of course, but few people have any idea how many churches, administrative buildings, townships, village settlements, mills, hospitals, fortified houses, sugar factories and so forth survive throughout the region. It is only when one visits these monuments of the Templars, Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights that one can gain some conception of the resources poured into them and the quality of their construction. It was, therefore, a very good idea to write a guide to them. Adrian Boas's approach is thematic. He draws attention to the orders' city properties, although he falls into the old error of referring to their compounds as ‘quarters’, which on the whole they were not. He introduces his readers to their farms and settlements in the countryside and he describes their castles in great detail. He tries to give some impression of the daily life of the brothers as evidenced by excavated material and he provides an account of the artefacts associated with them. He concludes with a chronological table and a gazetteer, which is especially valuable because of the bibliographical information it contains. His treatment is necessarily much more detailed on the buildings to be found in Israel than on those in Syria and Lebanon, and while he is au fait with the results of recent excavations in Israel (including, very usefully, some which have not yet been published) and considers at length the most remarkable of all, at the site of the Hospitaller compound in Acre, he is less assured elsewhere. It is not surprising that he should not be fully informed of all the developments with respect to the Templar castle at Tartus, but it is odd that he should still associate the old Greek Orthodox cathedral in Nicosia with the Order of St Thomas. Boas is an archaeologist rather than a historian and odd errors of fact crop up occasionally, together with rather simplistic interpretations of historical material, especially with regard to the brothers' daily life. Nevertheless this book will be very useful to scholars and tourists as a guide to the wealth of material that survives.