While I’ve always enjoyed Dan Brown’s thrillers for the unadulterated escapism they provide, Inferno is predictable and unexciting. It plods on, and despite its page count, has little meat on its bone. Sure, it’s perfectly readable, and the die-hards might be satisfied with Robert Langdon’s fourth adventure, but for the rest of us, it’s a mostly tedious romp.
This time round, shockingly, the fate of the world rests in Robert Langdon’s hands. Only our esteemed professor is suffering from that most hackneyed of ailments: retrograde amnesia. He appears to have suffered a gunshot wound to the back of his head, and the trauma has decimated his memories of the preceding hours, which, naturally, hold the key to unlocking a great, deadly mystery. What Langdon gradually begins to understand is that a bad guy – the worst guy, who so-happens to be obsessed with Dante and the Plague – is convinced that over-population is humanity’s greatest threat. And that therefore a purge is necessary…
Inferno is a mishmash of tropes and characters readers will be familiar with. It’s all well and good to play homage to the great thriller writers of our time and borrow elements from their work – but this time, things just feel a little too cramped, too analogous. Characters float in and out of the story, their desires are over-explained with dull monologues, and the repeated use of ellipsis and the phrase “never the less” quickly becomes grating.
Say what you will about Dan Brown, but at the very least, he’s always provided action-packed page-turning romps. That’s not the case here. Inferno isn’t terrible. It’s not an insult. It’s just infuriatingly average.
ISBN: 9780552173483
Format: Paperback (198mm x 127mm x mm)
Pages: 624
Imprint: Corgi Books
Publisher: Transworld Publishers Ltd
Publish Date: 6-Oct-2016
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Raina Telgemeier continues her exploration of tween and teenage social and family life in her heartfelt graphic novel Ghosts, which adds a twist of the supernatural to proceedings.
I slipped into hyperbole earlier this year when I 
Rise the Dark, the second book in the Markus Novak series, is a masterful suspense novel, replete with crackling prose, nail-biting thrills, and a crackerjack pace. Dangling the plausibility of physic possibility, and pushing its characters to their physical and mental limits, Michael Koryta has crafted a thriller that will induce an unprecedented kind of page-turning compulsivity. In other words, it’s very, very good.
After avenging the death of a fallen 00 Section agent in Helsinki, James Bond assumes his fellow agent’s workload, which takes him to Berlin, on a seemingly routine mission to dismantle a drug-trafficking operation.
Michael Connelly often references Joseph Wambaugh as one of his writing influences, but until Harbour Nocturne, I’d never read one of the former LAPD sergeant’s books. Now that I have, I’m keen to delve into his backlist; particularly his early stuff, which established his reputation as the father of the modern police novel. Wambaugh’s most recent novel – published in 2012 – reminded me of Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series, which is a very good thing indeed. Just like McBain’s long-running series, it isn’t necessarily the crime – or the actual plot – that makes Harbour Nocturne so absorbing. It’s the cops – their unique blend of personalities and experiences – that make the story zing, and allows for moments of genuine hilarity and heartbreak. These cops are real people, thrust into insane scenarios, just trying to do their best to keep the city safe.
Until the series ended, Brian Michael Bendis’s Ultimate Spider-Man was a staple of my comics reading. When it launched in 2000 I was thirteen-years-old, and the perfect age to read about a teenage Peter Parker. As I got older, and my interest in the medium fluctuated, Ultimate Spider-Man remained an essential component of my reading life. Even when ‘ultimate’ Peter died, and was replaced by the Hispanic teenager Miles Morales died – by which time I was a full-fledged adult – I remained whole-heartedly invested in the world and its characters.
Out of Bounds is Val McDermid’s thirtieth book, and the fourth of the Karen Pirie series. In this outing, Pirie – of Police Scotland’s Historical Cases Unit – finds herself tangled in the web of an intriguing trio of cases, only one of which begins as official police business.
Despite its overriding bleakness, there’s a lyrical beauty to AS Patric’s Miles Franklin award-winning Black Rock White City. It is a novel that refuses to conform to expectations. It is a powerful, relentless journey through a long dark tunnel, with few glimpses of light, and very little to warm the soul. We want this story of migrated Serbian couple to end well. Jovan and Suzana have already been through so much. But Black Rock White City isn’t about happy endings; it’s about our capacity to keep on keeping on; to outlive the past by picking up the pieces of a shattered life and patching together something sustainable. Something worth living for.
For the pure pleasure of uncomplicated, nonstop action, no thriller this year has come close to matching Erik Storey’s Nothing Short of Dying, the first in what promises to be an adrenaline-fuelled series starring Clyde Barr.