Deception Point, by Dan Brown

Summary: NASA has just made a shocking discovery with major ramifications for the presidential election. Someone tries to kill some of the people vaguely connected with the discovery. They find themselves running for their lives hoping to share their similarly shocking conlcusion with the world. Ha, I had enough vague details to make an entire summary this time.

Reaction: I enjoyed it. Up until near the end when I started getting kinda distracted by what I was going to write here and the fact that it was kinda late. But of course I couldn't wait until today to finish it (ok, technically I did finish it this morning very early; that's not the point). The second half of the book has several narrow escapes (by the last gunfight I was getting rather tired of such things and wondering if maybe instead of the high suspense/drama drawn-out battle they could instead just give me a summarized version: "After much fighting, a kills b after b has shot c. However c still manages to shoot d who spent the entire fight hiding behind something large waiting for a chance to kill a, and meanwhile e and f have disappeared to parts unknown" (This summary is not meant to reflect actual events in this or any other book). Although come to think of it, it was only that large scene where people were getting shot. Mostly. Er, I guess there was another one. Never mind.)

I think one of the things I enjoyed most about this book, much like with The Last Templar (which incidentally I keep getting mixed up with The Da Vinci Code, I think), is the characters. Each character has their own set of motives for what they do and there are no clearly defined battle lines between good and evil. Okay, maybe the protagonists are good and the people trying to kill them are evil. But besides that, one needs another category for, I don't know, unpleasant. Er, maybe one needs two categories so that one can sort the political figures into two rival camps. Anyway, you probably get my point.

Comment about female chraracters: It seems like all female characters in books get referred to by first name and many male characters get referred to by last name. Either that or sometimes first, sometimes last. *gets distracted looking something up* This particular book has a female character referred to exclusively by last name and a male character always referred to by first name (I'm talking only about what name the author uses to refer to said character, not how various characters refer to each other). One thing I noticed about the female character, however, is that she could be replaced with a male character and it would make no difference in the story. Most of the rest are/were involved in some kind of romance with another character, which means that the reader must be continually reminded that the character is female. Or something like that. Uh, yeah. No idea where I'm going with all this.

Comparision with Angels and Demons: 

Well the most obvious parallel is the lead-up to a sex scene at the end of the book. And the completely unexpectedness of the ultimate culprit (I was too busy expecting the Catholic Church to have been behind it to even consider the possibility that the red herring wasn't responsible. But why was she acting so suspicious then?) Hm, that's probably it. Aside from delving into formulaic stuff like "a few chapters of set-up followed by the main premise being dropped in someone's lap" etc