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Off The Shelf For November 2019

For November I’ve gone back to a favourite author, though (for me) a new book: it’s Dan Brown‘s “Inferno”.

When I’m working on my children’s adventure series I like to try and channel my inner Dan Brown so will often read or re-read one of his fabulous thrillers. I like his short chapters and fast pace and oh so cryptic clues. I don’t mind admitting that I try and emulate all of those things for my Thadius Drake series in the hope that one day I can be even a hundredth as popular as Dan Brown.

And yet, and yet…Inferno is not going to be the book I read and re-read over and over again. The Da Vinci Code? Loved it. The Lost Symbol? Couldn’t put it down. Inferno…yeah it’s good but not great. Then again what do I know? It topped the New York Times best-seller list for eleven weeks upon its release in 2013 and a film adaptation came out three years later.

To give you some background, it’s the fourth book in the Robert Langdon mystery series which sees our eminent professor and symbologist racing around Florence having woken up in hospital with amnesia (a convenient plot tactic if ever there was one). Hours earlier, as gunshots rang through the corridor outside his hospital room, he had mysteriously found himself being pursued by a gun-toting woman in black leather, yet with no idea of why she wants him dead.

Now helped by the doctor tending him and with the Italian police and a secretive squad of soldiers also on their tail he must uncover what happened in the vital hours missing from his memory. This involves trying to decipher a cryptic message based on Dante‘s Inferno which has somehow involved Robert Langdon stealing Dante’s death mask from the The Palazzo Vecchio.

At this moment of writing, your guess is as good as mine as to why he should have done that and of course I will continue reading as the mystery unravels, safe in the knowledge that our hero Robert Langdon could never be the bad guy and I suspect it is all going to turn out all right in the end. Phew.