Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

The best way to describe it is as some sort of cross between a Dan Brown novel and a techno thriller with a snarky narrator and a D&D analog named “Rockets and Warlocks” tossed in for flavor. As interesting as this may sound, my reaction to it was a more or less resounding “meh”.

This book is about a down and out web designer named Clay who's last chance at putting supper on the table is a job at an odd book store that he just happens to pass by. Of course the book store turns out to be more than what it seems. Its actually a front for a secret society of what amounts to code breakers, and Clay brings all his technology whiz buddies to bear in cracking the centuries old code that consumes the lives of the code breakers.

I really wanted to like this book, and one interesting thing about it was the way it brought together elements of an old fashioned, mystical, secret society with the technology of google, and the internet age in general. And the plot pacing was pretty good, good enough to keep me reading through the end anyway. However . . .

In the beginning the prose alternated from being readable to being really clunky. Most of this was smoothed out by the beginning of the second though. I wasn't kidding when I said the book was sort of like a Dan Brown novel. I'm not going to give the end away, but if you have read either Angels and Demons or The DaVinci Code its not hard to guess the gist of the ending of Mr. Penumbra. I guess there is more I could say about the characters, and especially what seemed to me to be the contrived (and painful) use of a fictional fantasy series as a necessary piece of the plot, but I think I'm going to stop there.

In summary, it wasn't a great read, but if there is a dearth of reading material this will keep you entertained for a while.

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