A Book Review: Inferno by Dan Brown

Inferno by Dan Brown. Harvard professor Robert Langdon awakens in an Italian hospital. He has short-term amnesia. His last memory is of him being in the United States. He has no idea how he ended up in a Italian hospital. Almost immediately, an assassin barges through the door and kills one of his doctors. The remaining doctor, Sienna Brooks, rushes him out of the room and they barely escape the assassin. Langdon has no idea why he is being targeting, but it soon becomes apparent that there is a mad man who wants to commit an atrocious worldwide genocide. Though Langdon has no idea of this horrible fact, Sienna Brooks and him are uncovering clues to help him figure out why everyone is chasing after him. For some reason, the clues revolve around Dante's The Inferno. 

I felt like I was reading the book version of Nicolas Cage's National Treasure. This book is like being on a roller coaster that blasts around curves without slowing down. Honestly, I'm not sure that is a good thing. The book deals with a very heavy topic: world over-population. And yet, there are only brief discussions of this issue and mainly from the point of view of the mad man. Instead, time is spent on describing tourist locations across Italy. Now if one wants to read about where to go in Florence and Venice that's just fine, but it seems like this book is discussing a theory that is never fully investigated. I suspect if sentences were eliminated from this book that over-describe various tourist spots, the book would be 20% shorter.

Now, of course, does the book have a few interesting twists? Yes. And as those twists were revealed, I scanned through some of the prior pages and came to the realization that I'd made some wrong assumptions. That was fun seeing how Dan Brown had manipulated my perceptions. Even then, I consider this book a let down when compared to The Da Vinci Code and The Lost Symbol.