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”...