Dan Brown, 2003, Doubleday

Brown couldn’t decide if he wanted to write a Hollywood thriller screenplay, or an Umberto Eco tribute. So he selected elements of each, and thus The DaVinci Code was born.
It’s an action packed tale, spanning roughly two days time, where the Grail Conspiracy collides with greedy Church officials, eccentric British knights, Harvard Symbology professors, and, of course, the requisite blood-line of Jesus. While it’s a fun ride, I frequently found myself wanting to get a bit … er … medieval on Brown. His transgressions start with his cribbed-from-Fyodor’s place descriptions, to his tour-guide size comparisons. How many times must I read the square footage of a building or a plaza? And must I be told that the Louvre is longer than three Eiffel Towers laid end to end, while the Grand Gallery is as long as three Washington Monuments?
Then, borrowing a page from any techno- thriller, Brown has high-tech tracking gadgets and frequent cell phone usage. Unfortunately, he feels the need to go into detail on how these things work; even more unfortunately, he gets it all hopelessly wrong. Cell phones ringing on planes over the mid- Atlantic? A tracking dot that “continuously transmits its location to a Global Positioning System satellite that [police] can monitor” which works to an accuracy of two feet, even when the trackee is underground.
The overall plot is, as mentioned before, a fun ride. It’s full of the improbable narrow escapes and now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t switcheroos that make for a good Summer action film, mixed with enough history and Grail legends to give it an intellectual patina. Still, in the end, we’re left unsatisfied. It’s difficult to have strong feelings for any of the characters, as they’re often presented as foils for a plot point or an opportunity to lecture on semiotics. The twists and turns get less and less believable as the pages pass, and, by the end of the book, we find that we wish it had ended a few twists back.