Disappointing. Started off like an incredible action movie. The scenes fantastical and over the top. Then half way through it seemed like Mr. Brokaw decided he was tired of writing. It was hurried and choppy. So much of the intrigue was left out and instead a ridiculously lame and childish love triangle took up more pages than it was worth. I didn't want to read about Professor Lourds being a male whore, I would have rather read about the adventures in finding the final pieces to the scroll. I struggled with this one. The author essentially tells this story along two tracks, one involving the highly skilled but overly trusting linguist and archaeologist Dr. Lourds, who plays the hero unwittingly, the other concentrating on fictional U.S. Vice President Elliot Webster's plan for a power grab and world domination via a crisis he stirs in Saudi Arabia. Webster has more than just political ambition, which becomes perfectly evident as the novel traces toward a climactic confrontation between Lourds and Webster, between good and evil.The chapters and scenes involving Lourds prove the more intriguing of the story's two sides. First kidnapped, then rescued only to become absorbed in cracking a secret coded document that could help save the world, Lourds draws the reader with playful fascination into attempting to untangle the conspiratorial mystery of what is coded within the Scroll of Joy. But how exactly do you convey the mental mechanics of a borderline genius linguist's mind in print? Admittedly that's a challenge, and that's where the hero becomes aloof. The author never quite enlightens us to the linguist's eureka moments, instead sending him off to a separate room whenever he's busy doing his code cracking, or conveying that Lourds has already translated a particular piece and has just now decided to share it. This becomes frustrating and alienates the reader from the hero a bit. Also frustrating is the author's incessant tactic of inserting some of Lourds' noncontributory thoughts into the narrative. Instead of sharing revelations about how Lourds mentally unweaved a coded language, we get running mental quips, along the lines of "We're in real trouble now." These obvious observations become so annoying, I nearly abandoned the book.As for Webster, here's where the author really fails to deliver. He never fully develops or explains the intricacies of the vice president's heinous plot. Other adventure and spy novels set in the Middle East typically delve into rather elaborately explaining the social dichotomies that separate Shia and Sunni culture or the powder keg nature of Middle East politics. The author does not do a good enough job of that in this work. His research seems thin to nonexistent. It's as if he wrote this based on watching the 5 minutes or so of Middle East news coverage on World News Tonight. As a result, Vice President Webster's plan is presented without any explanatory research. This leaves the reader to fill in A LOT of gaps and also diminishes the credibility of Webster's plan. His endgame just seemed too far-fetched without a clear connecting of the dots.Ultimately the showdown between Lourds and Webster falls short of rescuing this novel. In fact, if you prefer a realistic slant to your fiction, might want to avoid this book completely.
What do You think about The Lucifer Code (2010)?
Somehow I just couldn't stop thinking about Dick Chaney while reading this book...
—mewde
One of very few books that I was unable to put down.
—Artemis
