The Da Vinci Legacy

Rating:
Summary: Heart-thumping, a grabber from first page
Review: I was hooked on the first page and did not put this book down until I had finished it.

Perdue's prose moves at supersonic speed as he takes us through Italy and along the dark alleys of Amsterdam in pursuit of a mysterious batch of bones and documents that could alter the world as we know it.

This had all the thriller elements that boost the roller coaster ride I buy thrillers for. Yeah, so what that it has a couple of artifacts left over from an update.

For my taste, that pales besides Dan Brown's page after page after page of historical errors, religious errors and contrived tripe that left me totally cold on that other Da Vinci book.

Fact also is that this is the original thriller book on the subject and even if you don't like it, you might want to compare its many similarities with Code.

Rating:
Summary: The absolute worst of modern fiction?
Review: Oh... my... God

This truly is a car crash of a novel.

From talk of the "cambridge university campus" (which does not/has never existed - there is not even a central student's union!)

2D characters, plot lines left flailing in the wind.

Never before have I been so confident of writing a publishable novel myself!

Rating:
Summary: Creative, Fun, Fast
Review: The creativity of Da Vinci Legacy was a delight to read. Perdue first builds a solid historical launching pad out of history, Da Vinci, art and religion and then ignites a very, very creative series of "what ifs" that carry this book into orbit.

The Elect Brothers of St. Peter with their bloodline to Peter, the custody of their bones and their claim to the True Church are a close parallel to the Templars and the Priory of Sion without being slavishly derivative. Likewise, the graveyard of famous artists, writers, scientists and politicians associated with the Brotherhood.

While the relationship between the hero (Erikson) and heroine (Storm) is the usual "loathe at first sight" Hollywood thing, the unique personal characteristics of those characters overcomes that mundaneness.

In many ways, Da Vinci Legacy has too many good characters and sub-plots and might have been improved by some editing. For example, one of the bad guys -- an evil group of powerful multinational corporations that look like today's main globalization villains -- seems to have crept in from another Perdue book: the Delphi Betrayal which I bought from a used paperback store a few weeka ago. While the globalization issues are very interesting and believable, I didn't need them in this book. However, it's one more indication of how Perdue's books have been decades ahead of their time.

I found the book well-written and probably worth reading again sometime.

Rating:
Summary: If poor writing annoys you, don't read this book
Review: I do a lot of traveling and often read thriller/adventure novels to pass the time. This was the worst-written book I've read in my
seven years of air travel. While I thought the plot was weak, my main issue was with the writing itself. Here are two examples:

"she...sipped at her drink with a vengeance..."

"Christ, Vance thought, the woman has nerves like a battleship!"

If the above doesn't bother you, then you might possibly like the book. However, these are just two examples of many and not the worst -- just what I remember. I found the writing so distractingly bad that I couldn't enjoy the book at all. I actually don't know why I bothered to finish it. But I did throw it away afterwards -- something I almost never do.

Rating:
Summary: It's not The DaVinci Code, get OVER it
Review: This book was originally published in 1983. But, after the success of the Da Vinci Code (a truly awesome book, that I would probably rate very close to a 96), TOR re-released the book and apparently "updated" it, trying to ride on the coat tails of Dan Brown's wildly successful book.

It appears that they just opened up their giant publishing word processor and did a massive find-and-replace, changing dates, events, names. The main character on the back cover of the book is Curtis Davis, but they changed his name to Vance Erickson, who knows why. Does it affect your reading of the book? No. Get over it. Some of the changes got discombobulated. The Gulf War was not in 1966. We know September 11th happened after 1983. But none of these minor details really lessens the appeal of the book.

This is not a bad book, though not a great book. Its enjoyable in the same way one might enjoy a Steven Seagal movie. I love Seagal movies, even though I would not call any of them great and tend to watch them on USA, TNT or SpikeTV than pay money to even rent them. I feel the same way about David Morrell books (First Blood, ya know? Rambo) and The Da Vinci Legacy reminded me a lot of David Morrell.

The characters are not well developed, rather B movie like. Perdue violates one of my cardinal rules for thrillers, he mixes romance with action. I hate it and it rarely works. Hey, it ruined Empire Strikes Back and you would have thought Lucas would have remembered that with Attack of the Clones. The romantic angle wasn't as bad as some books, but I still do not want to see it.

This is a religious thriller revolving around some lost pages of a codex written by Leonardo Da Vinci that suggest a way of generating lightening and using it as a weapon. A group of religious zealots want the codex to bring down the Papal Church and a group of investors want it to rule the world. Our plucky hero Vance Erickson is stuck in the middle being the worlds leading amateur Da Vinci scholar.

The religious angle is interesting, though weak, especially when compared to such great religious thriller classics as Umberto Eco's, The Name of the Rose, Thomas Gifford's The Assassini, and of course Dan Brown's doublet, Angles & Demons and The Da Vinci Code. Having read the Da Vinci Code the day it came out and then have since read this book, Brown had to have been influenced by Perdue. The stories are NOT the same but the trappings are there. Especially if you read the jacket cover of Daughter of God written by Perdue in 2001 you can see subtle likenesses. Of course this does not mean that Brown stole anything from Perdue, may of these conspiracy theories, underground religions, etc have been around for a long, long time.

One word of caution here. It seems that a lot of people want The Da Vinci Legacy and The Da Vinci Code to be the same. They want Perdue to read like Brown. This cannot happen people! That is not a fair comparison. You would not expect King to read like Poe would you? Just avoid the comparison.
That said, I did have a hard time putting the book down. The plot is good, the book reads fast and is very captivating. This is an excellent book to read on a long flight or if you just need a mindless escape. Get past the re-issue idiosyncrasies and have fun with this book.

For more details, go to aj.huff.org. Thanks.

Rating:
Summary: Legacy: Love it or Hate it: I LOVED it!
Review: This book wasa cool read because it was fast, fun and well written. It was cool too because it shows where the original idea for the Davinci Code came from. This is not a coattails book, this is what came first.

I was particularly struck by the Davinci scholar, Martini, who left his dying message in his own blood, just like the curator in Davinci code.And if my count is right, Martini is the fourth scholar to be killed and so is the curator in Code.

I suppose this is a book that inspires either hatred or love, and I certainly loved it.

Yes, there are a couple of continuity errors in dates, but quite frankly I did not notice any of these until they were mentioned by other reviewers. They did not distract me from the story nearly as much as Dan Brown's massive historical errors (pointed out by the New York Times and many others) in Davinci Code which were central to that book

Rating:
Summary: Perhaps the worst novel I have read in a long time
Review: Essentially, I put novels in three categories. First, there are a very small number of books that transcend and that you think about for a long time. You read other books and wonder why they couldn't be more like those in this special category. Second, there are books that come into your life, stay with you for a little, and then leave you with fond feelings and modest memories. Third, there are books that simply make you dumber, or if not make you dumber, make you long you'd reached for something - anything! - else from the bookshelf. Almost every book I read is in the second category. I love books. I find something to like in almost all of them. This book, I'm afraid, is in the third category.

The first problem is the editing. Originally released in the early 80s, there was apparently a dramatic rush back to the printer and the shelves while Dan Brown's DaVinci Code still has coattails. Unfortunately, this wrecks havoc with the book. Rather than leaving it set in 1983, the author and/or editor took a very cursory run at attempting to update it. Accordingly, the book now takes place "ten years" after September 11, 2001. There are references to that date and the tragic events of it, as some sort of shorthand way for making you think the book is current. Unfortunately, they forgot to change the rest of it. Accordingly, the President of the United States is still Ronald Regan, people who are about 50 in the book were born in the 1930s (according to their background), computers are very rudimentary and still have green screens, and there are about a million other cues to let you know it is 1980. Oh - I almost forgot, the fact that there is a cold war ongoing with the Russians also serves as a backdrop.

This problem, though, is merely distracting, and pales in comparison to the other problems. First, the plot is so idiotic and implausible that it caused me to laugh out loud in places. If the plot were simply a Macguffin to create an excuse for the action, that would be one thing, but it isn't -- it takes itself completely seriously. Moreover, the action sequences are absurd. There are (no lie) about ten sequences that are the exact same, and pretty much described the exact same way. (In each, there are at least two circumstances of "bullets ripping" into whatever object -- wall, snowbank, water -- happens to be right next to our unlikable hero and heroine.)

The big-bad-corporate-bad-guy premise is, in a word, sophomoric. (Ok, three words -- sophomoric, unconvincing, and uninteresting.) Perhaps it suffers from the fact that the book I read just before it, John Le carre's The Constant Gardner, did a very nice job at the worldwide-corporate-conglomorate-bad guy, and so DaVinci suffers by comparison. Minor kudos for the nice marriage of religious zealots and corporate america, but emphasis on "minor."

I've got a bunch more negative stuff to say about this book. Dropped plot lines, silly devices that simply trick instead of allowing you to discover, entirely undeveloped important characters, etc. I realize, though, that I'm starting to sound like a jerk. I like books. Really. I almost never take the effort to post a review on amazon, and when I do, I'm usually positive. But I was angry when I finished this one. I know it's just one man's opinion and others of you really seem to like this book, but in a world where there are a thousand times more books to read than we'll ever have time to read, this one strikes me as a waste.

Rating:
Summary: fun action, not enought facts
Review: I loved all of Dan Brown's books, and I was looking for something else to read in that vein. I'm just writing this because I'm sure some of you are too.

I saw this at Walmart so I picked it up for around five dollars, which was not too shabby. And it was just ok. I love books with lots of knowledge and lots of facts, like all books by Dan Brown and Micheal Crichton. I like to feel like I learned something new and interesting about science, religion, etc. This is basically an action type book, but we don't really care about what happens since the importance is not explained.

Why do we care if several pages are missing from the codex? There is about one paragraph at the end that says what is in the pages, and it is explained poorly. It would be like me telling everyone I am going on a quest for this urn, and shadowy figures try to kill me as I race around Italy looking for this urn, and then I find the urn and finally reveal that it has my mother's ashes in it. And that's all I say.

I also don't like the fact that parts of the book were rewritten. I always look at the copyright date on the inside cover, and this one said 1970 something, and then there were all kinds of references to technology, 9/11, ect. inside. Seems kind of silly. And the description of the book is wrong. There is no character named Curtis Davis. Deception in advertising.

Rating:
Summary: Great timing for a re-release of an old book!
Review: This book was originally written in 1983, and then released again after the "Da Vinci Code" took off I presume. Hey, nothing wrong with updating an old work to make some quick bucks on the coattails of someone else. It worked on me; I picked up a 20 year old book which was on sale at the airport 5 days ago. Not a bad job of marketing.

The book itself has on its acknowledgements page the following statement: "About half the book is true. It's up to the reader to figure out which half". I think I did. All of the physical locations sited in Italy and in the US are in fact real places. The rest is nonsense.

I did enjoy the pacing of the story, and there was enough mindless "james bond-esque" types of action that it kept me entertained. However, it reads like one of the poorer of the Bond films. Think Roger Moore and his wise cracks and quirks in his last two films. Simply way over towards the "campy" end of the believability scale.

If you find yourself on a plane with a short battery in your laptop and enjoy reading about Italy with some mild intrigue thrown in, then this is a book for you. Otherwise, it is like the "Da Vinci Code", a decent story built around some historical conspiracy theories and unsubstantiated religious connections. I would say that both of the books have the scholarly attributes of the National Enquirer, but this book is not written quite as well.

Rating:
Summary: The Best Da Vinci for My Taste
Review: I suppose there really is no accounting for taste. While I have not logged on to Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code to leave my opinion (it was not the book for my taste), if I had, I could have left one that read pretty well like the ones here that gave 1 and 2-star reviews. However My opinions were reversed.

I found Perdue's Da Vinci Legacy a very well told story, well plotted and with enough twists and turns to keep me surprised and involved in the book and I liked it far more than Brown's.

But thriller books are like Pepsi and Coke, some of us have a taste for one, some for the other.

I didn't find the famous people associated with the Elect Brothers of St. Peter to be any less believable than those associated with Brown's Priory of Sion, nor did I find those religious fanatics to be any crazier than the way Brown portrayed Opus Dei.

I did find more things to enjoy in Da Vinci Legacy than in Code, but that must fall into the "no accounting for taste" part of the equation....

I do agree with other reviewers here that this 20yr-old book is not as well written as Perdue's latest two books, Daughter of God and Slatewiper, but I do believe the writing here is at least as good as Brown's.