DAN BROWN – Deception Point.

Pocket, paperback reprint; 1st printing, December 2002. Hardcover edition: Atria, November 2001.

   There are more than 550 pages in this recent techno-thriller with strong political overtones, and unless I lost track of time, it all takes place in just over or under 24 hours. And in most of the action is Rachel Sexton, who works for NASA and who’s on the outs with her U.S. Senator father, who’s making a strong run for the Presidency, based on an even stronger anti-NASA platform.

   But something’s afoot in the Arctic. NASA has made an earth-shaking discovery of some sort, and so far they’ve been keeping it under wraps. To convince Rachel to commit to his side, her boss whisks her off to the Milne Ice Shelf before making a world-wide television announcement that will completely change the course of the campaign.

   Not all is what it seems, and Dan Brown continually managed to keep me off guard most of the way through. (One thing I did know is that when on page 65, it is revealed that Rachel is petrified of open water, that it’s one hundred percent guaranteed that she will be later challenged in this regard, and probably more than once. And she is.)

   Brown knows his technology, or if he doesn’t, he certainly convinced me that he does. And the scary thing is, you start to wonder, if the government has this much power and this much control of almost everything, what possible say does a common citizen have to alter the way the country is run, to influence the decisions that are made?

   To say that the book is compulsively readable is an understatement. The thrusts and counter-thrusts, by each of the parties involved, both political and physical, never cease, and deciding who exactly is on whose team is like grasping images in smoke.

   The ending can’t possibly survive the accumulated firepower of all that goes before, and it doesn’t, but in terms of a pyrotechnic display, it’s one heck of a show while it lasts.

[UPDATE] 01-07-09.  In case you were wondering, this is still the only book by Dan Brown that I’ve read. The review was written several months before his next book came out (March 2003).