: The Codex
Author: Douglas Preston
This is a surprisingly well-written book, though the plot is obvious and the execution weak. The premise bodes well: three distant brothers are brought together by their father, who’s dying. Then he drops the bomb. Since he got most of his $500 million wealth robbing tombs, he has buried himself with all his treasures in a tomb somewhere on the planet and it will be up to the sons to find him to claim their inheritance. In the process, he hopes his useless sons will become men. This sounded intriguing as I pictured a globe-trotting adventure as the sons followed clues leading from exotic country to exotic country, but unfortunately the story immediately leads to the wilds of Central America and stays there until the end. This makes it rather tedious and boring, since reading about weeks and weeks of starvation hiking through jungles gets old quickly. Fortunately, Preston does better with characterization and other aspects of the plot, but for this kind of novel, it needs to be driven by the story, not characters. Weak.
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