Angels & Demons by Dan BrownMy rating: 1 of 5 stars
I felt really betrayed with this book in several ways.
1. The ending is all wrong. The reader is led down one path and is waiting for the ending to resolve all the false clues and suddenly, from left field, comes the perpetrator.
2. The ending is inconsistent with what you know about the characters. I hate this. If people are going to act in a psychotic way, there are clues to their behavior in everyday life. On the surface, sociopaths can fool a lot of people, but in reality, there are always signs and eventually the people around then feel uneasy. Something is not right. Serial killers are usually dysfunctional individuals who are most frequently loners. Brown ignores this and gives us a murderer that is not plausible.
3. The author has a hidden agenda and betrays the reader with it. This, I think, bothered me the most. Until the end, I thought that Brown wrote with compassion and understanding, but in the end he tries to manipulate the reader.
4. The numerous false leads are either inadequately explained or simply don't exist. A writer, no matter how thrilling the middle chapters of his book are, doesn't get a free ride in the last chapter. Things need to be explained, clues need to be sorted out and resolved. Characters need to burst forth in the clothing they have been wearing throughout the novel, not a new and bizarre garb. If it has been a costume, the reader needs to be able to see where he was mislead, and it has to make sense.
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