Inferno: (Robert Langdon Book 4)

Robert Langdon and me - we have some sort of love-hate relationship. In every Dan Brown there's a point at which I ask myself why I keep reading these books...but as weird as this sounds, at the end I always like them and I buy the next book in the series, I just can't help it. And it was the same with this book. Robert Langdon wakes up at a hospital in Florence. He has a head injury but no memory at all of the last two days. And then it's all just getting worse from there. He's chased by a killer, an elite force, a governmental organization and the carabinieri, while he tries to find out what has happened. At this point there was in my opinion way too much action far from any reality involved...I mean how are the chances for an American art history professor barely speaking Italian to succeed in running away from all these experienced professionals...in Italy? But then another piece of the puzzle is revealed: apparently Langdon was trying to save the world from Inferno à la Dante Alighieri created by a brilliant maniac. And the story goes down a dark but very creative path from here that leaves you behind reflecting what you just read and what's good and evil. During reading I kept changing my mind from rating it 2 to 5 stars frequently. There even was a time when I thought about putting the book aside. Luckily I continued reading because then there were so many twists and turns that everything that had disturbed or annoyed me before, now suddenly made perfect sense. I also find the big theme of overpopulation and all the issues related very interesting. But the best as in each one of the Robert Langdon books is the detailed descriptions of artwork, landscape and cities. I love, love, love the parts of the book that have the style of an adventurous tour guide. And in this case it was something very special to me as I had the "I've been there!!" moment quite a lot and I enjoyed it very much to travel back to northern Italy with this book.