Dan Brown is best known for The Da Vinci Code and its sequel, Angels and Demons, both of which were made into movies starring Tom Hanks. Deception Point was published between those two blockbusters, but the story is unrelated, has a different cast of characters and, as yet, has not been made into a Hollywood movie.
But it will.
The plot has plenty of action, suspense, dramatic settings and pyrotechnics. How could Hollywood resist?
The book has more than the average number of twists and turns that populate suspense/action novels. The story centers on the discovery of a meteorite, buried for thousands of years under polar ice. This meteorite turns out to be rather special in that it contains fossils which prove, beyond doubt, that not only does life exist elsewhere in the universe, but strongly suggests that life on earth was seeded by just such meteorites. Needless to say, this is huge news and just happens to occur in the middle of a contentious campaign for the U.S. Presidency. The current President, who is in trouble in the polls, latches upon this discovery to boost both his popularity and NASA’s, the agency that discovered the meteorite. To certify the validity of the discovery, the President assembles a team of 5 civilians to review the data. One just happens to be the estranged daughter of his opponent, who holds a senior position as an analyst with the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), an agency with the mission statement “enabling U.S. global information superiority, during peace and through war.” Part of her job is to interpret classified data and to brief the President and other White House staff. In this role, the President sends her to the arctic to get her take on whether the discovery is, indeed, real.
It is, she tells the White House.
But no sooner had she briefed the staff at the White House than doubt about the discovery starts to creep in. Before she can take back her certification, she is running for her life, pursued by Delta Force soldiers. Something is very, very wrong here.
Well, it won’t spoil the plot to tell you it is all a huge fraud, but the fun is in who concocted the plot, how it managed to fool the best scientists on the planet and what the motive was.
The first 100 pages are a bit slow and it isn’t clear where the story is headed for a while, but once the fraud starts to unravel the action picks up and never lets up. The final 450 pages are can’t-put-it-down fun.
9 out of 10.