Deception Point, by Dan Brown

It has been quite a while, since I have picked up a book, dived into it like the world ceased to exist around me and not lift my head up until I finished it. It was Dan Brown's 'Deception Point' that kept me glued to my chair (the floor rather, the comfort of which, I feel, is far more than any chair or sofa!) all of yesterday amidst a couple of tasty meals and some tasteless comedy strips and business news on television.

The author's uncanny knack of squeezing a few hours of storyline into 500 pages of text just bowls me over. The previous book that I read of Brown was ‘Angels & Demons’, where the entire story from start to finish spanned a countdown of just six hours. This time it was slightly longer – a day! The basis of the book was far away from Christianity this time, a change from the previous two books that I have read (the first being the bestseller, ‘The Da Vinci Code’), but the tone and the pulse of the book were quite similar. It had Dan Brown written on it all over!

The book is about a meteorite discovered by NASA on the top of the world (literally) and the impending political ramifications on the credibility of the NASA and the presidential elections in the United States. With civilian scientists and a celebrity television anchor brought on to authenticate NASA’s claims, a special task force, which keeps killing people right from page one (the epilogue actually!) at the commands of a mysterious ‘controller’ and the scandals of the presidential candidate, Dan Brown has enough threads to sometimes confuse the reader. There are of course some Hollywood touches to the book. Some of escapes of the protagonists are somewhat unbelievable. Yet, overall, he does a great job intertwining the different threads, unraveling plots one by one and adding new twists to the story.

Although the final twist is typical Dan Brown again, it is not evident until a couple of chapters before he actually reveals it. Even at that point, it is easy guesswork only for someone who has been through the other two books. If you have not, the author will surprise you even more.