Inferno (Robert Langdon, #4)

by Dan Brown

[empressbrooke]

Since Dan Brown bored me in his attempt to out Dan Brown himself on [b:The Lost Symbol|6411961|The Lost Symbol (Robert Langdon, #3)|Dan Brown|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1358274396s/6411961.jpg|6600281], I was in no rush getting to Inferno. However, he definitely improved things here and I was mostly entertained.

His writing is still stiff and often awkward (WHY does he refer to the protagonist by his full name once every chapter? We know who he is! Especially by chapter 90!), and it was about 100 pages too long, but I shall focus on the compliments I have to give.

Reversing his trend over his last couple books, he mostly stopped info-dumping at the expense of the plot. Things kept moving forward as he worked all of his informative tidbits more organically into the story. He did seem to revert back to Lost Symbol levels of stopping the plot for pages to rattle on about this thing or that towards the very end of the book, but that may have just been me being ready to be done after page 400.

There were multiple plot twists I didn't see coming! Granted, there were a couple that I thought were a bit contrived and may not have held up if I went back and re-read the previous parts with the reveals in mind (But maybe they would have! I wasn't invested enough to spend the time checking). However, the other ones left me pleasantly surprised and definitely mixed things up compared to what the series had me expecting.

The resolution was interesting and not as straightforward as I'd expected. Although I felt the book was overly lengthy and didn't need to exceed 500 pages, at the end I at least felt like there was interesting payoff.