Author: Glenn Cooper
Publisher: Lascaux media (no website found)
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.
This was yet another novel with a prologue which I skipped as usual. If it's worth reading, it's worth putting in the first chapter! If it's not in the first chapter or beyond, I'm not going to waste my time reading it. The novel begins with a fire in an abbey in France during which a firefighter discovers a codex (ancient book) hidden in a wall space. The front page inside the cover claims that its writer is Barthomieu, who is 220 years old at the time of writing. Why the writer would mention this is a mystery. He's supposed to be a humble monk. The codex is lavishly illustrated, as they say, but the drawings appear to mimic those found in cave art from the paleolithic, rather than representative of the age in which they were drawn in the codex.
Frankly this novel didn't stir my interest until chapter four wherein we began learning about this mysterious codex. At that point I felt I could quite happily have skipped the first three chapters without missing anything since they really told me nothing. The codex contains a map which a book restorer, Hugo, and an archaeologist acquaintance (and amateur playboy), Luc, follow. It takes them along a cliff face, to the discovery of the very cave to which the map was intended to lead. Inside, the cave is adorned with scores of images in a vein similar to those found in the prehistoric caves at Altamira and Lascaux.
But it appears that someone else is interested - someone who has far fewer scruples than do Hugo and Luc, and the body count begins to mount. As the cave is opened to scientific investigation, people start turning up dead, and two locals, who creep their way into the cave team's camp are to me, highly suspicious, although, of course, no one suspects them. This was the first problem, It was obvious these people were bad guys. No mystery at all here. The only mystery which remained was why was there such an interest in the cave? That turned out to be so mundane that it was frankly laughable.
I have to say that about 40% in, I was having serious doubts about wanting to continue reading this. Although the novel is technically well-written, there was a heck of a lot of extraneous detail (for me anyway). I wanted to get on with the exploration of the cavern, and the deciphering of the codex (which was written in code rather like the Voynich codex).
I certainly didn't want to be dallying and dithering, and especially not with an old love interest of Luc's, which bored the pants off me. He was not an appealing person, so there was nothing to attract me to him as a main protagonist. His love interest wasn't of interest at all - not to me, and it was so obvious where this was going that there was no mystery there either.
Unless she turned out to be the villain, she had nothing to recommend her other than that she was Luc's ex, which is frankly a lousy excuse for her to be in this novel. Oh, she did have one other trait: she was a damsel in distress which turned me right off pursuing this story any further.
Luc's behavior towards her bordered on stalking and assumed ownership of her, which also turned me off this story, and made me wish he was the one being pushed over a cliff. When he 'turned around' and started posing as the hero of the story, solving the mystery and rescuing the 'fair maiden', I was not the least bit interested.
The title of the novel is misleading. It implies that there's something magical or evil about the tenth chamber in the cavern, and there really isn't. It did relate to something important to the story, but that was completely insufficient to justify its dramatic use as a title.
The more I read, the more I found myself skipping a paragraph here and there (mostly there) to begin with, then I skipped with increasing frequency. There were alternating chapters which went back to the time the codex was written, and other chapters which went back to the time the cave paintings were made, and after reading one of each of these, I found them so boring that I avoided all the others.
Obviously, it's no leap from that to asking myself why I was reading this at all, and that's when I quit. I didn't care about the ending or any of the characters. The proposition that "villains" who had supposedly been at their game for centuries hiding in the shadows, never exposing themselves, had suddenly become so blindly stupid that they exposed everything within a few dumb days by killing as many people as they could for no reason whatsoever was risible. Some people may find entertainment here in counting the number of clichés and tropes in this story, but for me, I lost all interest in it. I cannot recommend this.
