** spoiler alert ** I changed my rating. Originally I gave it an "Ok" with 2 stars because I sort of thought that it served its purpose as a page-turner. Though even within the credit for that, I thought it also should have been about 200 pages shorter. Perhaps Robert Langdon's overly long explanations could have been about 50% reduced to help out with that aspect.

But now I think, I remember having to force myself to get back into the book. And feeling like I was getting bored and skimming pages. And the ending is so bad it almost cancels out everything else that was even mildly enjoyable.

But anyway, here are my issues with the book. When I was about 100 pages in, I thought to myself, I cannot believe the similarities to DaVinci Code. Obviously we have Langdon again, but that's not an issue to reuse the same character. What is an issue is that there is again one single, male, psychotically evil and gruesome villain. There is also an authority figure with questionable motives. There is also a beloved old friend in trouble (DaVinci it was the murdered guy at the beginning, here it's Peter Solomon). There is also the very intelligent female companion. I was surprised Bellamy didn't turn out to be a bad guy since he is the older expert helping them along for a time. These character similarities urked me from the beginning, but I will admit I did get into the story eventually.

However, once I was into it, I did find myself a good few times being taken out of the story due to the unbelievability of things, especially towards the end. And I'm not talking about problems with the science or the action of the plot, but believability of emotion. After all the madness of the big climax of the story (which I do admit I did not see coming - the big reveal), which is obviously a crazily emotional and draining experience for the Solomons, I could not believe that they immediately snapped back into their previous selves. It felt to me like Brown wrote the big climax, then took a two week break and came back to writing, so that all of the emotion of the climax/finale was forgotten. Suddenly Katharine is skipping off to go check out something interesting Peter wants her to see. And Peter is beckoning Robert to his office to have an intellectual, winking, story-telling moment and trip around DC. What? Didn't you just spend about 2 days getting tortured? Didn't you just almost have to murder a very important person? Didn't you, about an hour ago, believe you were about to be murdered?? Oh, but now you want to talk about how interesting history is again? I mean, I thought it was ludicrous. And that Katharine is willing to hop off and indulge Peter's suggestion instead of saying, "ummm...how about we check that out in a couple of days? For now we should possibly both take a trip to the hospital."

I felt like the end was weak enough to cancel out the fun of a lot of the rest of the story. And the amount of background characters give when they're supposed to be in a stressful, 'let's get a move on!' situation was really frustrating throughout. Like when they're with the priest and he's sitting there all amused with their ponderings, like absolutely every single intellectual character is written by Brown. Every one of them is given a moment where they smile as they wait and see if their companion, who they are having a teaching moment with, can figure out what they're thinking. The priest does it, Peter Solomon does it, and lord knows Langdon does it. I get it. They are intellectuals and love this stuff. But they're not sitting in a classroom. They are on the run from the CIA and have less than a few hours to save the life of a friend. Just unbelievable.