From: Doug Pensinger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> David Hobby wrote:
S P O I L E R
S P A C E
Somewhere around half-way through it, I started yelling at the characters, saying something on the order of, "Take the stupid puzzle box to an CAT scanner already!"
Getting out of so many tight squeezes was another thing that bothered me.
The twist at the end obviously took a lot of work to set up, and I think a lot of that was well done. It didn't really hit me as one might wish it too, but I don't see how to rewrite it to make it work better.
I just didn't buy into the jovial, friendly Grail expert being the manipulative Teacher and that all of a sudden the previously evil Cardinal and his albino henchman were the Teacher's poor, misused victims.
The book goes through lots of contortions to mislead readers about what's going on. It so blatantly made the cop look like the bad guy that I figured it *had* to be someone else, but no one fit. That it was the nice grail expert being the ruthless bad guy that kills to preserve his identity struck me as the least plausible, or at least worst-founded, part. The Cardinal's "conversion" to victim from villain was a bit more believable for me in the sense that I don't think he intended for anyone to be killed. I didn't really have any pity for Silas (the albino), though, but I'm not sure he was intended to be seen as a victim.
Overall, pretty good, and I learned some stuff about art, but was slightly disappointed at the ending.
My wife read both Angels and Demons and TDVC, and she thought TDVC was better, but A&D was pretty good.
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