Splintered Icon

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 mystery, romance and danger revolving around antiquarian Harry Blake, seems to lifted ad verbatim from the pages of an unpublished Brown scenario.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: show more 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 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 show more 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

Summary: Harry Blake, antique map dealer from Lincoln, is called upon by a local member of the landed gentry to decipher an Elizabeth journal bequeathed to him by a long-lost Jamaican relative. When Sir Toby shows up dead and thugs have been chasing Harry around Oxford, he teams up with Sir Toby's feisty daughter and equally vivacious marine historian Zola Khan, along with Dalton, a mysterious man of indeterminate ethnicity, education and employment, to finish deciphering the journal and follow where it leads them.

This compares very favourably to a large number of this style of book which I read often, because:

a) the protagonist is an academic with a bit of army background, not an ex-SEAL now working for CIA/FBI, who ends up in a show more violent treasure hunt through his professional engagement rather than because he went looking for it

b) said protagonist is British (soooooooo many of these stories are US-based, and while I have no objection to that, it's nice to have a change!)

c) there is only one flight made at short notice, most of the rest of the travel is localised and thus plausible.

d) it's half the length of the genre standard so the plot is generally tighter.

e) 19-year-old heiresses are cool.

It fails on the same grounds that many do:

a) Zola Khan, the marine historian with the amazing classic car? Seriously?

b) Everyone seems to have a lot of fight training. I don't know any particularly combative academics apart from a rower or two.

Lots of fun, but I'd rather read a Clive Cussler. If someone convinces Cussler to write a UK-based thriller, I'll buy it in hardback on the first day. show less

Face it folks...this book doesn't purport to be great literature, so don't look for it here!
So here's the deal...no, it's not another DaVinci Code, like the blurbs say, not that I ever would hold anything up to the DaVinci Code to measure its "worthiness" -- the DVC just isn't worth using as THE model for this kind of story. Splintered Icon is just a fun story to spend a few hours reading away. It is one of those fun kind of suspense-ish books that starts out like a bibliomystery that turns into a case of international intrigue that gets kind of silly. But that doesn't mean I wouldn't recommend it...if you just want a fun read and you see this one, pick it up and give it a try.

The basic plot:

Harry Blake is an antiquarian seller of show more books in England, and owns a little shop. His true passion, however, is collecting old maps, always hoping to find the big one that will fetch hundreds of thousands of pounds at Sotheby's. One day he is summoned to meet with Sir Toby Tebbit, local squire, who has, it seems, inherited a journal from the Jamaican side of the family, of whose existence he never knew. But as he looks through the journal, he realizes it's unreadable, so calls on good old Harry to decode the journal. The journal is written in a secret code popular during the time of Elizabeth I; but as Harry begins to work on the journal, he is offered a rather large price for the book by a complete stranger. Harry, being the impeccable man of scruples that he is, refuses. He realizes that he's going to need some help and turns to his friend Zola for assistance. In the meantime, Sir Toby is murdered and Harry realizes that the other group of people looking for the book will stop at nothing until they have it. Toby and Zola discover that the author of the journal has information that is very valuable.

What's really fun about this book is that you get to go back into history -- at the time of Sir Walter Raleigh -- and watch as a conspiracy unfolds on the high seas. All of this, of course, is what's embedded within the journal's pages. I was fascinated with the author's discussion of the history of the calendar, of John Dee being the first "secret agent" complete with the code name "007" and the history of a true plot against the throne of England by the Catholics.

I won't go into any more details here or it would truly wreck the story for someone who wants to read it. I liked Harry Blake, and I hope that Mr. Napier is planning to bring us more stories featuring this character. show less

Dan Brown has a lot to answer for, number one on the list being the plethora of "hunt for the holy relic" novels he spawned with the unbelievably popular The DaVinci Code. Not that Splintered Icon is a bad read: it's fun, enjoyable, and somewhat more believable than many of its cousins. And this particular take on the genre gives us a look at a relatively obscure (at least on this side of the pond) expedition to the New World featuring Sir Walter Raleigh, his cohorts, and a suspected Catholic plot against Queen Elizabeth. That alone makes this novel worth slogging through the unsurprising surprises and not-so-twisty twists of a done-to-death storyline. Or maybe I've just read too many of this type of novel. I do have a weakness for show more them, regardless of their familiarity.

Fluffy, but fun. show less

This is a thriller written along the line of the DaVinci Code without a lot of the ciphers. At first, I wasn't terribly impressed. I found the dialogue a bit stilted and the plot unoriginal. It got better after the introduction of Ogilvie's journal. As a young Scotsman gives his view of historical events surrounding the struggle for power between Elizabethan England and Spain I found my interest sparked. Not my best read of this year, but not as bad as I first expected.

Great story, an adventure and race against time to retrieve a religious artifact, a piece of the True Cross of Christ. This is the first book I have read, of this type, that sent you back in time with diaries that told of the journey to Roanoke Island with clues about the artifact. The present day was a historian on the trail of the artifact against bad guys and religious circles. It kept a certain pace, so you were kept interested and turning the page to see what happens. I am not a spoiler so you will have to read and see … Did they retrieve it?? Was a relic fake from the Crusades??