Bill Napier

I don't usually read thrillers, but this one really held my interest. The real question this book poses is: Who and what can we trust? What do we know - or do we just think we know it?

I did not find the technical jargon off-putting. Maybe I read more science than the other reviewers, maybe I am better at reading past things I don't understand if they are not necessary to the plot. In hindsight I think that the technical language is supposed to be somewhat overpowering. What I did find show more troubling was the feeling from early on that details weren't quite right. Again, I think now that this was deliberate.

There is a lot more going on in this book than I expected when I started it. show less

What is this? I don't even... That's the best way to describe my experiences reading this book. I'm reminded of Dan Brown (the literary equivalent of a fast food diner) and Neal Stephenson (that small restaurant hidden in an alley where they serve the best steak in town), neither in a positive way. Napier's two storylines should work in tandem to tell a story, but he could have separated them into two different books and we would have been none the wiser. The first, a "riveting" tale of show more mystery, romance and danger revolving around antiquarian Harry Blake, seems to lifted ad verbatim from the pages of an unpublished Brown scenario. Scholar gets drawn into a mysterious plot to do [BAD DEED X] with [RELIGIOUS THINGY Y], but then he [RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD]. Sound familiar? I thought it would. And to make matters worse: while Brown's Mary Sue might be annoying, Napier's Blake is far superior in that particular field of study. The man is an antiquarian in a quaint English village and his reaction when getting stabbed, robbed, beaten and otherwise beset by evil agents of terror is to man up and go 007 on them. Seriously? You're trying to tell me Mr. Blake wouldn't be soiling his underwear and applying for the British equivalent of the Witness Protection Program? Or at the very least shoving the manuscript up his employer's tightest orifice with a note saying: "Thanks, but no thanks"? Shove a few deus ex machina moments in there and you have the recipe for the worst book I've read in the past year. The other storyline, a journal of a young man's voyage across the Atlantic, is better. But you know what? It's also the plot that gets the smallest amount of attention from Napier, seemingly serving no other purpose but to fill out pages. If Napier had focused on Mr. Ogilvie's voyage and its mysterious purpose, I would have been happy to rate this 3x times what I have rated this book now. All in all I am not inclined to try my hand at another Napier. show less

Bill Napier, author of "Shattered Icon", seems to be trying to be Britain's answer to Dan Brown, author of the super-success "The Da Vinci Code".
There are many similarities between "Shattered Icon" and "The Da Vinci Code". The story is very fast-moving, the hero and heroine are well-educated people with specialised historical knowledge, and the plot is based on events related to the Catholic church that happened long ago.
When I started the book I was swept along by the fast-paced action and show more was enjoying the idea of an encrypted 400-year-old journal. But as I continued reading I realised that the story was not very believable. By the time I got to the end, I could see holes in the plot that were big enough to drive a bus through.
If you're willing to totally suspend your disbelief and go along for the ride, then this is lots of fun. But if a plot that doesn't make sense and characters that are fairly two-dimensional reduce your enjoyment of a book, then you should look elsewhere. show less

This has been lying on my tbr mountain for ages and now I know why, after reading Nemesis and Shattered Icon I was really looking forward to this. I found it really disappointing, it wasn't the science that let the book down it was the rest of the story. When the George Bush clone is the most reasonable of the world leaders involved in the story then you know that you've got problems. Having said that I did read this in one sitting so it can't be that bad, I just think it suffers in show more comparison with his other books. show less