Inferno by Dan Brown

‘Seek and ye shall find.’
With these words echoing in his head, eminent Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon awakes in a hospital bed with no recollection of where he is or how he got there. Nor can he explain the origin of the macabre object that is found hidden in his belongings.
A threat to his life will propel him and a young doctor, Sienna Brooks, into a breakneck chase across the city of Florence. Only Langdon’s knowledge of hidden passageways and ancient secrets that lie behind its historic facade can save them from the clutches of their unknown pursuers.
With only a few lines from Dante’s dark and epic masterpiece, The Inferno, to guide them, they must decipher a sequence of codes buried deep within some of the most celebrated artefacts of the Renaissance – sculptures, paintings, buildings – to find the answers to a puzzle which may, or may not, help them save the world from a terrifying threat…

I was disappointed. A lot. I had hoped that Brown would return to the easy going fun and thrilling read that to me describes both Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code. The Lost Symbol always seemed like a rushed and forced book to me and I never enjoyed it.

Inferno held a lot of promise to me. It'd been years and years since the last book so he had had plenty of time to write something good. Unfortunately.. it flunked completely.

First of all, it takes bloody ages to get going and thanks to Langdon suffering amnesia he never has any clue as to what's going on and why and he's basically being chased around various Italian locations whilst having no clue. I've never liked those sort of plot setups and this was no exception. I think it's incredibly frustration trying to piece together past events like that and even more annoying is SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT the fact that it's all a gigantic plot twist and who can you trust anyway and oh let's just turn this thing into a sci-fi novel because why not.

Frankly I hated the ending. I loved books 1 and 2 as they could (in some theoretical sense) take place. It's not all that far out. Book 3 could even happen. Book 4? No. It's stupid.

Also, I found an old article that lists a number of flaws - as in Langdon's knowledge being wrong, flaws that could easily have been corrected had they been researched better. Reading that just further annoyed me about this book.

3 stars for being occasionally interesting. 2 stars for sounding like a dull tourist guide half the time. 1 stars for the sci-fi-ish end. Blegh.

	Inferno Robert Langdon #4 by Dan Brown ISBN13: 9780593072493 463 pages / published in 2013
	Review by Iben Jakobsen, BoB, 2014