The Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown

Description from Amazon:

Accompanying celebrated academic, Katherine Solomon, to a lecture she’s been invited to give in Prague, Robert Langdon’s world spirals out of control when she disappears without trace from their hotel room. Far from home and out of his comfort zone, Langdon must pit his wits against forces unknown to recover the woman he loves.

But Prague is an old and dangerous place, steeped in folklore and mystery. Little can Langdon know that he is being stalked by a spectre from that dark past. He must use all of his arcane knowledge to navigate a shadow city hiding in plain sight, a city which has successfully kept its secrets for centuries and will not readily give them up...

 

I had stopped reading Dan Brown novels for a while. The first couple were really clever but then they started being “samey” so when I saw this doorstop of a book, I figured why not. Okay the title is rather daft. I know it gets explained in the book but it’s still really silly.

The content is heavy. Truly cerebral stuff. And you have to concentrate super hard on what they are saying most of the time just to understand the sentence, let alone the contents.

So Katherine was about to publish a book that could have put a lot of people in danger / brought scientific discoveries to light that should not have been let out. And we all know there are people on levels above other people who pull strings and keep things quiet. So the powers that be swoop in in an elaborate scheme to protect their experiments while eliminating threats. And these have been years in the making.

The addition of The Golem and the ether experienced along with the stories behind Prague made for some good historical reading. All the descriptions were lovely and vivid and truly transported you to other times and places.  

But the book itself. Yikes. Too many clues trying to be cryptic. Too many side plots on side plots. Too much information on the subject matter itself (and repeated over and over) that it was beginning to feel like a journal article. I hate it when reading a book becomes slogging through it, but I pushed ahead as the chapters were not too long and he cut them in places where you did really want to find out what would happen. But with ludicrous parts like Langdon seeing and smelling something that was described in a dream and running back to his hotel, then setting off the fire alarm, and jumping out of the hotel window into an icy river, well then, you know ludicrous it shall be the whole way through.

That’s it for Dan Brown for me! You join my pile of “no more”...

Fearless by MW Craven

Description from Amazon:

Five million reasons why Ben Koenig had to disappear. Only one to bring him back . . .

Ben Koenig is a ghost. He doesn’t exist any more.

Six years ago it was Koenig who headed up the US Marshal's elite Special Ops group. They were the elite unit who hunted the bad guys – the really bad guys. They did this so no one else had to.

Until the day Koenig disappeared. He told no one why and he left no forwarding address. For six years he became a grey man. Invisible. He drifted from town to town, state to state. He was untraceable. It was as if he had never been.

But now Koenig’s face is on every television screen in the country. Someone from his past is trying to find him and they don't care how they do it. In the burning heat of the Chihuahuan Desert lies a town called Gauntlet, and there are people in there who have a secret they'll do anything to protect. They've killed before and they will kill again.

Only this time they’ve made a mistake. They’ve dismissed Koenig as just another drifter – but they’re wrong. Because Koenig has a condition, a unique disorder that makes it impossible for him to experience fear. And now they’re about to find out what a truly fearless man is capable of. Because Koenig’s coming for them. And hell’s coming with him . . .

 

I’m honestly not sure about this one. It’s a stark contrast to his Poe books and we have to take that into consideration so as not to compare them. But having read the cerebral workings of the Poe books and how the evidence was put together, this book relied on brute force. Do not read if squeamish, as Koening (since he can feel no fear), has no issue inflicting all sorts of violence on people.

The plot was rather far-fetched (The solar panels? And the convenient fall? Really?) and while I enjoyed the reasons he remained hidden and how he hid, it was like doing a Reacher series with a bigger and badder hero. I might read the second one just to see where this is going but this one was long, filled with a lot of technical stuff that made it difficult to keep of, and while there was a lot of violence (I wasn’t too fussed with it), was it all really necessary?

It was an average book and aimed generically.

Dead Ground by MW Craven

Description from Amazon:

Detective Sergeant Washington Poe is in court, fighting eviction from his beloved and isolated croft, when he is summoned to a backstreet brothel in Carlisle where a man has been beaten to death with a baseball bat. Poe is confused - he hunts serial killers and this appears to be a straightforward murder-by-pimp - but his attendance was requested personally, by the kind of people who prefer to remain in the shadows.

As Poe and the socially awkward programmer Tilly Bradshaw delve deeper into the case, they are faced with seemingly unanswerable questions: despite being heavily vetted for a high-profile job, why does nothing in the victim’s background check out? Why was a small ornament left at the murder scene - and why did someone on the investigation team steal it? And what is the connection to a flawlessly executed bank heist three years earlier, a heist where nothing was taken . . .

 

Initially I was taken aback as I had just finished The Impossible Fortune, where they were arguing over who the best James Bond was and this book opens with a bank robbery where they are using James Bond masks!

This wasn’t my favourite one in the series and I hate saying that because all the elements are there but it seems that some of the literary stretches we might accept are now being pushed even further and are a bit harder to fathom.

Poe is still fighting to keep his croft with Tilly representing him (can she do this?) when he is called out on a case he really has no business being at. Other people introduced to the investigation clash with Poe and the way he does things (surprise) but have an integral part in the outcome of the story.

When the victim is found to be involved in something that happened years ago in Afghanistan, where a team may have been part of something off the books, the evidence leads to an astonishing theft. Now, without giving spoilers, you find yourself at this point in the book going what? All of them? And how on earth was this navigated from the mental and physical position the person was in? I guess you will have to read it to find out what I mean!

What annoyed me was the book being over and then an extra bit coming in to explain even more about the theft that seemed an add on. And too many of our usual characters had such small roles to play in this book! And Tilly – since when has she learnt the art of subtle nuance and is able to use it in eyebrow-raising contexts? This was also, unfortunately, the worst one in the series where it comes to the reader not being able to figure out how or who but having to wait until the author decided to reveal it all.

I really hope that the next one in the series goes back to the formula that works for these characters and has us concentrating on the intricacies of the plot and not trying to figure out what is going on. I have another by him in a different series so let’s give Fearless a go and see what that is about so long.