'Origin' by Dan Brown
'Origin' by Dan Brown

The good

  • The typical action, thriller, mystery, and cliffhanger combination that makes every Dan Brown entertaining and hard to put down.

  • The central mystery actually turns out to be interesting worth waiting for the big reveal. I’ll avoid any spoilers here, but I will say that while not entirely new or original, it mostly holds together, and makes for an interesting discussion.

  • This story takes place in Spain, and as with all Dan Brown books, you get an exploration of some interesting locations and history.

The not so good

  • It follows the typical Dan Brown formula very closely: a big murder early on, the Church is somehow involved, a religious fanatic evil henchman, a mysterious mastermind bad guy hidden from view, a bunch of absurd why-would-you-ever-do-that puzzles that just happen to require symbology to solve, and of course, Robert Langdon just happens to be there to save the day, and he gets as his side kick a beautiful woman who is mostly there as a sounding board and occasional damsel in distress. It was fun the first time in The Da Vinci Code, but by the 5th Langdon book, it is definitely starting to wear thin.

  • There are a lot of artificial “delays” (for lack of a better word) in this book. The Edmond Kirsch character, for example, has a major announcement to make, and each time, he wastes countless pages building it up, getting ready to announce it, setting context, prefacing it, teasing it, showing a video that-you-think-will-reveal-it-but-just-has-more-teasers, and so on. I found myself saying, “JUST GET ON WITH IT,” as it really felt like Dan Brown was stretching things out just to build suspense.

  • It’s pretty easy to guess who the main villain is early in the story.

Rating: 4 stars