Deception Point - Dan Brown
I read Dan Brown's latest Robert Langdon book The Secret Of Secrets last year (or was it the year before? I lose track) and my overall impression was that it wasn't meant to be a Langdon book. I thought that it read like Brown's pre-Langdon techno-thrillers Deception Point and Digital Fortress, with Langdon shoehorned in because that's where the money is. My takeaway - other than it being shit - was that Brown was clearly tired of the character and the formula and wanted to go back to his earlier style of books, which (in my opinion) were always better than the Langdon books.
I've been in a reading slump and when I need to get out of a slump I turn to simple thrillers. John Grisham is my go-to author, but this time I decided to revisit Deception Point because I remember loving it.
Spoiler alert: it's dogshit, and it is in no way better than the Robert Langdon books - even the really, really bad ones. I wish I could go back in time and peek inside my brain to figure out what I liked about this when I first read it 20-something years ago.
I still really enjoy the conceit of it, and the first half - right up to the discovery of the conspiracy - is fun even if it's poorly written. But then it completely loses its way. I don't even want to spend the time and effort it would take to talk about why this is bad. It's just bad. I remember the reveal coming at the end of the book rather than halfway through, and I think that's probably some sort of defence mechanism my brain has enacted to help me forget how utterly dismal the back end of this novel is.
The worst part is that this took me a week to get through, so it didn't even fix my reading slump.