This book is horrible: formulaic Dan Brown, with a really boring and obvious ending. It annoyed me in so many ways it is hard to know where to start.
Katherine is supposedly a genius whose work in the field of Noetics is going to change the 'entire world forever'. But somehow she fails to be suspicious of a doctor who has supposedly been treating her brother (despite Peter never mentioning it), who invites her to his creepy house, wears a creepy amount of makeup, and manages to invite himself into her super-secret laboratory. As an aside the field of 'Noetics' in the real world, sounds like downtown quacksville.
The other characters are cliches stolen from weird places - Sato is totally 'Edna' the crazy designer from the Incredibles, and does Mal'akh the giant tatooed fanatic sound a little like Red Dragon to anyone else? Or perhaps the crazy albino, but with tattoos?
Brown seems to have hired a technology consultant for the 'hacking' section since he mentions traceroute and whois, but screws it up with sentences like:
Trish, this IP has a funky format. It's written in a protocol that isn't even publicly available yet. It's probably gov intel or military.
I'm running a diagnostic, and this firewall coding looks...pretty serious.
An IP address written in a protocol no-one else uses isn't going to be that useful now is it? In fact it won't even be an Internet Protocol (IP) address unless it conforms to the Internet Protocol. A serious firewall is just a whole lot of closed ports, and there is no 'coding' exposed to the outside. But no-one gets hacking right, and I digress.
The 'national security' issue that looms over most of the novel is pissweak. Oh no, some important people will be embarrassed in a video. Who cares. I thought Mr. Red Dragon had bought a nuke or something. And why is the CIA the ones running all over DC chasing this guy, shouldn't it be the FBI? Or weren't they sexy enough?
Brown uses a really annoying, lazy phrase to describe a memory flashback:
...Mal'akh flashed on the only other woman he had ever killed.
As Langdon tried to process what Katherine had said, he flashed unexpectedly on the gnostic Gospel of Mary...'flashed on'??? What the?
The ending couldn't have been more obvious. If you haven't picked where the ancient mysteries are located within the first 20 pages, you need to turn up your 'really obvious plot point' detector. Also, worst treasure ever. Seriously. Why the hell would you go to all that trouble to hide something so boring and commonplace?
The dénouement is the worst part of the whole book - pages of cobbled together references pointed in the vague direction of a hand-wavy philosophy conclusion. And it sounds like this:
...the Bible and the Ancient Mysteries are total opposites. The mysteries are all about the god within you...man as god. The Bible is all about the God above you...and man as a powerless sinner.Blah blah blah. Right at the end Brown builds us up for another big reveal that is...a sunrise. Yay.
Did you notice there were exactly 33 points made in this review? Not really, but if you believed that you will probably enjoy this book.
1 star.
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