Robert Langdon is at it again—fleeing from his pursuers in the dark of night, in the company of a stunning and intelligent female
accomplice, in a battle against time to make sure that truth wins and evil is vanquished. That is the basic premise of every Robert
Langdon book. It’s a bit tiresome, but
it’s also irresistible. The science,
art, and architecture tie-ins are always fascinating to me. Brown goes modern in this novel—the action
opens at the Bilbao Guggenheim and takes place largely in Gaudi’s Barcelona. I found the chase more interesting than the
revelation at the end, but I will probably pick up the next Dan Brown novel featuring Robert Langdon again, if there is one.
The latest book by the author of The Kite Runner reads like a collection of short stories, but they are all interconnected. The link between stories isn’t always immediately apparent and there are some diversions that take the reader far from Kabul, and sometimes confusingly so (the detour to Greece was interesting, but a bit disconnected from the rest of the storyline, I thought). There were some great narratives—one in particular that I think was worth the whole of the book— a story about Afghani-American cousins, Idris and Timur, who return to Kabul to attempt to regain an ancestral home, abandoned after the Soviet invasion. While Timur goes out and carouses and flaunts his American wealth, Idris spends most of his time showing charity to a young girl in hospital, a victim of an unspeakable act of violence which leaves her in need of surgery in a western nation. Idris, himself a doctor, promises to arrange the needed medical intervention, but when he returns to the US, the...

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