Dan Brown

[Andy]

I'm going to say something shocking now... Dan Brown it not that great a writer. Sure, the DaVinci code was excellent (although there was a lot of supect grammer), but he can only seem to do one type of book and story. I think the main reason the DaVinci code was so good was the subject mater, rather than the story itself. It was a great read but all his books are virtually exactly the same. Same charaters with different names, same plot structure. If you have read one Dan Brown book you have read them all. It's the Mill's And Boon of SciFi/Thriller. Thats not to say you won't enjoy them, you just have to take them for what they are. Pot Boilers.

Hit the nail on the head with that one...

Loved all of the books but your spot on.

[scottyman]

i'd have to agree - ideal holiday books... disengage brain and enjoy!
I'd say you've all got to get snow crash by neal stephenson tho - you'll laugh out loud - ditto with crytonomicon
http://www.nealstephenson.com/

from Bantam . . .

Snow Crash
Only once in a great while does a writer come along who defies comparison--a writer so original he redefines the way we look at the world. Neal Stephenson is such a writer and Snow Crash is such a novel, weaving virtual reality, Sumerian myth, and just about everything in between with a cool, hip cybersensibility to bring us the gigathriller of the information age.

In reality, Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for Uncle Enzo's CosaNostra Pizza Inc., but in the Metaverse he's a warrior prince. Plunging headlong into the enigma of a new computer virus that's striking down hackers everywhere, he races along the neon-lit streets on a search-and-destroy mission for the shadowy virtual villain threatening to bring about Infocalypse. Snow Crash is a mind-altering romp through a future America so bizarre, so outrageous...you'll recognize it immediately.

With this extraordinary first volume in what promises to be an epoch-making masterpiece, Neal Stephenson hacks into the secret histories of nations and the private obsessions of men, decrypting with dazzling virtuosity the forces that shaped this century.

In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse - mathematical genius and young Captain in the U.S. Navy - is assigned to detachment 2702. It is an outfit so secret that only a handful of people know it exists, and some of those people have names like Churchill and Roosevelt. The mission of Watrehouse and Detatchment 2702-commanded by Marine Raider Bobby Shaftoe-is to keep the Nazis ignorant of the fact that Allied Intelligence has cracked the enemy's fabled Enigma code. It is a game, a cryptographic chess match between Waterhouse and his German counterpart, translated into action by the gung-ho Shaftoe and his forces.

Fast-forward to the present, where Waterhouse's crypto-hacker grandson, Randy, is attempting to create a "data haven" in Southeast Asia - a place where encrypted data can be stored and exchanged free of repression and scrutiny. As governments and multinationals attack the endeavor, Randy joins forces with Shaftoe's tough-as-nails grandaughter, Amy, to secretly salvage a sunken Nazi sumarine that holds the key to keeping the dream of a data haven afloat. But soon their scheme brings to light a massive conspiracy with its roots in Detachment 2702 linked to an unbreakable Nazi code called Arethusa. And it will represent the path to unimaginable riches and a future of personal and digital liberty...or to universal totalitarianism reborn.

A breathtaking tour de force, and Neal Stephenson's most accomplished and affecting work to date, CRYPTONOMICON is profound and prophetic, hypnotic and hyper-driven, as it leaps forward and back between World War II and the World Wide Web, hinting all the while at a dark day-after-tomorrow. It is a work of great art, thought, and creative daring; the product of a truly iconoclastic imagination working with white-hot intensity.

they're utterly mental, and totally engaging.
first 2 chapters of crypto are pretty hard going, and it's worth digging out those maths memories - but it's just too cool for words!

[EvilWeevil]

I agree with the general views - formulaic but good.

melkonianarg - Derren Brown is a demon man and should be burnt at the stake

He's pretty good as well.