Book Review - The Book of Fate by Brad Meltzer
Category Book Reviews
This book looked like a good idea when I picked it up... The Book of Fate by Brad Meltzer. But promise and execution turned out to be two different things.
The story revolves around a presidential aid, Wes Holloway, whose life is forever altered in an assassination attempt. A colleague, Ron Boyle, is killed in the shooting, and Holloway blames himself for putting him in the limousine with the president in the first place. Holloway ends up disfigured from a bullet wound to the face, but he recovers and continues working for the president after he loses his re-election bid. During an overseas trip with the president, Holloway stumbles across someone who looks to be Boyle. When he starts to question whether Boyle's death actually occurred, a number of unknown parties start to get very interested in Holloway and his possible connection to whether Boyle is still out there somewhere. The assassin, a real lunatic who's been locked up in a psychiatric ward for years, is able to escape and appears to be working his way back to Holloway and the president. But is there a connection to Boyle at the same time? And is it possible to tell who can be trusted and who can't be in the president's inner circle of advisors, both then and now?
The cover of the book and the jacket make this sound like a Dan Brown conspiracy novel, complete with hidden clues and secret Masonic members throughout history. But at least for me, that whole part of the story never really tied into the action. Yes, there is a conspiracy thread going on, but it seemed to be far more pedestrian and "normal" than what the cover led me to expect. I also kept waiting to find out *why* I should care if Boyle was dead or not, and that was a long time coming. If I wasn't so compulsive about finishing a book once I started it, I might have returned this one to the library unfinished. Not that it's necessarily a bad read, but at 510 pages there was too much promise and too little delivery to drive a book of this length.
I've read other titles by Meltzer, and I wouldn't hesitate to pick up another one. But this one sure didn't meet my expectations...
This book looked like a good idea when I picked it up... The Book of Fate by Brad Meltzer. But promise and execution turned out to be two different things.
The story revolves around a presidential aid, Wes Holloway, whose life is forever altered in an assassination attempt. A colleague, Ron Boyle, is killed in the shooting, and Holloway blames himself for putting him in the limousine with the president in the first place. Holloway ends up disfigured from a bullet wound to the face, but he recovers and continues working for the president after he loses his re-election bid. During an overseas trip with the president, Holloway stumbles across someone who looks to be Boyle. When he starts to question whether Boyle's death actually occurred, a number of unknown parties start to get very interested in Holloway and his possible connection to whether Boyle is still out there somewhere. The assassin, a real lunatic who's been locked up in a psychiatric ward for years, is able to escape and appears to be working his way back to Holloway and the president. But is there a connection to Boyle at the same time? And is it possible to tell who can be trusted and who can't be in the president's inner circle of advisors, both then and now?
The cover of the book and the jacket make this sound like a Dan Brown conspiracy novel, complete with hidden clues and secret Masonic members throughout history. But at least for me, that whole part of the story never really tied into the action. Yes, there is a conspiracy thread going on, but it seemed to be far more pedestrian and "normal" than what the cover led me to expect. I also kept waiting to find out *why* I should care if Boyle was dead or not, and that was a long time coming. If I wasn't so compulsive about finishing a book once I started it, I might have returned this one to the library unfinished. Not that it's necessarily a bad read, but at 510 pages there was too much promise and too little delivery to drive a book of this length.
I've read other titles by Meltzer, and I wouldn't hesitate to pick up another one. But this one sure didn't meet my expectations...
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