Inferno - Dan Brown

Here's a good plan for when you have finished an audiobook and all your other audiobooks are still on hold at the library and you're unlikely to get one for a few more weeks - you go to your Goodreads "to-read" list and you start searching to see what is available.

What is not a good idea, is to go to your library's "available now" section of audiobooks, because then you will wander blithely into picking a mediocre novel by a famous author who once "stunned" the world with a provocative explosively popular novel over a decade ago. 

I think I was living in Italy when Dan Brown's The Davinci Code came out and I bought it from my Air Force Base's BX Store (in hardback!) and proceeded to read it in about three days. It was not Brown's first book to feature Harvard professor and symbologist Robert Langdon, but it was certainly his most popular. From it a movie with Tom Hanks was made, and since I love Tom Hanks, I saw that too. But although I went back and read all of Brown's earlier work, I haven't read anything published after The Davinci Code.

So I walked into Inferno knowing that Robert Langdon was back, and this was apparently a fourth Langdon novel (I entirely missed a third that came out some time ago). And well, my impression of Inferno is that I didn't miss much. In this one, Langdon wakes up in a hospital room, having been shot in Florence, Italy and he has retrograde amnesia covering the past 48 hours. Pursued by unknown assassins, he and a young English doctor, Sienna Brooks, must follow the path left by a madman prior to his suicide. The man, a famed geneticist named Bertran Zobrist - significantly obsessed with Dante and an impending global catastrophe represented by overpopulation - has left a video of himself placing a virus in a subterranean lagoon set to deploy in the next 36 hours.

Langdon and Brooks must attempt to locate the virus before it is too late. Of course not all is as it seems, including the virus and Brooks herself. 

I get it, by this point, Brown has the formula down that makes him money. Link up some obscure locations and facts, underlay a conspiracy and shadowy groups that operate on the margins, and have Langdon go on a treasure hunt of sorts to find the pieces. Voila, publishing gold. Really at this point Brown likely has so much money, more books are not necessary, but the publishing contracts don't fulfill themselves I suppose. 

But this one felt a little more lifeless than the Davinci Code. A little more rote. It was sort of like a chase scene combined with a Rick Steve's guide and somehow had an underwhelming baby. The evil guy was seriously weird and twisted, but actually not that evil. The symbols were detailed and well researched, but for all that I'm not really sure they served a purpose other than leading us on a 400 page scavenger hunt. 

Was I entertained? Yes. But since I wasn't on the beach or an airplane, this felt like too little work, for too little reward. I did end up recently watching the movie and several things were changed from the book, including the entire ending. (you can rent the movie here). 

3/5 Stars.