Book Log 2014 #8: Inferno by Dan Brown

I hadn't planned on reading this - The Lost Symbol was bad enough to put me off the series - but when I found myself short on reading material and copies of Inferno readily available, I figured I'd give it a go.


Unlike previous books, Inferno takes a more direct thriller approach rather than trying to shoehorn a worldwide conspiracy into the plot. In this story, our symbologist hero Robert Langdon wakes up in a hospital with no idea where he is or how he got there. Over time he begins to figure out the where (Florence) and when (a day or two after his last memory), but is still stumped by the why, and what his visions of a grey haired woman has to do with any of it.

An attack on the hospital leads him to flee with one of the doctors, whose brilliance belies her attachment to a fairly mundane hospital. Over the course of time the pair learn what Langdon was doing in Florence - trying to stop a mysterious, Dante-loving figure from releasing a man-made plague into the world.

It's still not the most compelling writing out there, even for the genre, but it's miles ahead of The Lost Symbol. There's still too much exposition for my taste - memories of a lecture given on Dante at some point in the past pop up quite a bit to explain how Langdon makes connections, for example - and there's some unproven mumbo jumbo about how the shadowy Consortium in the book is an actual thing. But for what it is, it's surprisingly not bad. Not the most ringing endorsement, but better than what I was expecting to say about it.