Krishna
Rachel Sexton, daughter of the presidential candidate Senator Sedgewick Sexton, is surprised when President Zachary Herney calls for her. She is just a cryptology expert in NRO. Her father is a Presidential hopeful and is ahead in the polls, not least due to his virulent opposition to the wasteful expenditure of NASA of late. She is against everything her father personally and politically expounds.
Her bewilderment increases when she is asked to corroborate a key evidence of NASA as an outside expert! Michael Tolland, a television personality and Corky Marlinson, an independent scientist, join her in the validation.
What she finds blows her mind away, and it is so amazing that it can destroy her father’s campaign and Zachary Herney is a truly amazing human being, up close. She feels no pressure not least since her director, William Pickering of NRO has promised that he will pull her out if she is in any way coerced to corroborate something against her better judgement. She endorses the find as genuine, because she believes it is so.
One little discrepancy worries them so much that they are sent underground to investigate. When that little voyage turns dangerous and when a blatant attempt by persons unknown is made to kill the whole lot under the very noses of NASA scientists waiting for them above ground, they know something is very very wrong!
This book has the same tension and taut storytelling that is in every book of Dan Brown’s. The story is more involved than Digital Fortress but does not have the sophistication of his latter two books, Angels and Demons as well as The Da Vinci Code. The cliffhanger at the end of evey chapter is almost a mandatory requirement for his books and it is there. Even so, you can see the progression of the plot complexity in Dan Brown’s works by just reading the books in the order they were written!
It is kind of easy to determine who the ‘Evil One’ is in this book, if you by now know Dan Brown’s style. The story, however, will keep you turning the pages.
I think that it deserves a 6/10
— Krishna