The Book of Fate
Reading a thriller is more often than not, a zero sum game. You get to bite your fingernails all the way to the end but the story and the characters evaporate into oblivion the moment you put the book down. Sometimes, rarely, they linger. And sometimes you end up with a negative score, as with Brad Meltzer's "The Book of Fate".
Let me start with a confession - this is the first Brad Meltzer book I have read. I decided on it as a "non-serious" break between two heavy reads and also because of Meltzer's well received previous novel "The Zero Game". "The Book of Fate" however was a disappointment. The storyline is interesting enough. An assassination attempt on President (and second-time hopeful) Leland Manning kills Ron Boyle, his closest advisor and best friend and permanently scars his top aide Wes Holloway. Fast-forward eight years. Manning is out of office, but Holloway stays with him and on one of Manning's lecture tours, in Malaysia, bumps into the "dead" Ron Boyle. This discovery puts into motion Wes' frantic chase around the country to find out what really happened eight years ago, that had left him scarred and had ruined his high flying career.
Deceptions and conspiracies are plentiful in the novel and Meltzer has done a great job researching the internal working of the White House machinery. He even tries to develop Wes as a character but what we get is a whining low-esteem figure who manages to get on the reader's nerve even before the story can take a hold. The rest of the characters are too flat even to mention in this review. What is even more irritating is the apparent contradiction in the character. The wimpy Wes suddenly takes on a superman persona, clever enough to evade FBI and CIA sleuths. If all this wasn't distraction enough Meltzer brings in a good dose of Freemason conspiracy into the picture. How I long for the day when thriller writers realise that we have had enough for those masons and their eons old plan to take over the world, or whatever it is that they are aiming for these days. To make things worse, it turns out that those masons do not have much to do in the story after all. It doesn't help that the reader, expecting a twist in the end, most probably might guess it correctly.
"The Book of Fate" is a damp squib that just does not deliver. You could, however, still support us by buying it using our associate link.
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