Book Review: Digital Fortress

My current form in devouvouring literature continues, and I demolished this nice, juicy novel by Dan Brown today itself, reading almost cover to cover(I had to break for lunch in between).

Needless to say, it was a really good book. Now, I generally don't enjoy thrillers, but Mr. Brown seems writes them exceedingly well. Digital Fortress was just as fast paced as The Da Vinci Code, and every bit as exciting. Each chapter, as the critics have said, is indeed a cliffhanger. The author uses the style of switching betweeen characters at the end of each chapter, which is quite perfect for the genre. In addition to this, the novel itself is well researched, and presented. Its about an unbreakable code, which if released, will render everyone's favorite non-existent spy agency, the NSA(National Security Agency) completely obsolete.

The characters in the book are also very well crafted. The author seems to have this love for keeping proffesor types as his main characters, which seems to work quite well.

The only criticism I have to offer is that these otherwise intelligent, crafted characters seem to turn absolutely dense at the turning points in the story, when the big ass clues are to be deciphered. As the reader, you usually guess way before the characters do, which quite frankly is not right. You feel like yelling at them, as the answer seems so obvious, but will not occur to them for a couple of pages more.

But, aside from that, it was an excellent read. Go pick it up, or if you have a decent library, go issue it. It will be an afternoon/night/week well spent.