INFERNO.

INFERNO by DAN BROWN.

SOURCE: Purchased with a Waterstones gift card.

THE BOOK {According to the back cover}: 'Seek and ye shall find'.

Florence: Harvard symbologist awakes in a hospital bed with no recollection of where he is or how he got there. Nor can he explain the origin of the macabre object that is found hidden in his belongings.

A threat to his life will propel him and a young doctor, Sienna Brooks, into a breakneck chase across the city. Only Langdon's knowledge of the hidden passageways and ancient secrets that lie behind its historic facade can save them from the clutches of their unknown pursuers.

With only a few lines from Dante's Inferno to guide them, they must decipher a sequence of codes buried deep within some of the Renaissance's most celebrated artworks to find the answers to a puzzle which may, or may not, help them save the world from a terrifying threat ...

FIRST SENTENCE {Prologue}: I am the Shade.

MEMORABLE MOMENT {Page 353}:'Robert, we're in book publishing. We don't have access to private jets.'
'We both know you're lyig my friend.'
Faukman sighed. 'Okay, let me rephrase that. We don't have access to private jets for authors of tomes about religious history. If you want to write Fifty Shades of Iconography, we can talk.'

MY THOUGHTS: One of what I think of as 'marmite' authors, Dan Brown really is one of those writers that you either like or don't with no in between or at least that's what I used to think.

Whilst normally a big fan of Mr Brown's, The Da Vinci came as a revelation and I even thoroughly enjoyed The Lost Symbol (see my review here) despite the criticism thrown at it, alas whilst an OK read I was disappointed with this, his much hyped latest thriller.

A topical read and arguably a more serious (grown-up?) one - unlike the threat set to undermine Christianity in the form of heresy/a nuclear bomb or indeed the threat to America at the hands of those pesky Freemasons practising all manner of weird rituals  - without giving too much away this tells of a potential world wide threat to the whole of mankind.

Though in many ways the familiar Boys Own (albeit for adults) offering we have come to expect of this series in some ways it was quite different. And I hate to say it but it is these very differences that if not exactly spoiling the story certainly marred my enjoyment of it.

On occasion slow paced, peppered with bad metaphors (yes, bad even for Mr Brown) and with a tendency to over emphasise certain points, Inferno (largely inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy) is certainly not the page-turner of a read I'd expected. Nor is it nearly as full of the symbology I loved in the other books and, despite my excitement that I'd actually visited these places in Venice and Istanbul, it was full of what felt like descriptions of the sort you'd find in any good travel guide. It was however the new, self assured, more James Bond less bookish Indiana Jones type Robert Langdon, the physical chases (many of them more reminiscent of 007) instead of the more psychological that disappointed the most.