Angels and Demons by Dan Brown. PART 1

Alright, the guy is a good writer, I admit that. In fact, for the most part, I loved this book's action, and am also a fan of a few of his other books.

However, and this is a big however, there is a lot wrong with this book.

It starts out with Robert Langdon, our would-be hero who spends most of this book... um... sort of following people around and learning things, who is dreaming. In his dream, he is in Giza, the place with the pyramids, and is actually trying to climb one! At the top is a beautiful woman, who turns into a cadaver or something, screams at him and cue the cliche wake-up-in-a-cold-sweat scene. Foreshadowing!? ...well, no. This is never brought up again, and has very little, if anything, to do with the plot.

So he gets a call from an amazing science institute that, although I, as an astrophysics degree-holder, have never heard of it, apparently holds like 90% of the world's scientists. This place may exist, since there are supercollider facilities all over europe, but somehow I doubt they are secretly creating ever invention on earth other than the Honda robot.

I digress. They send out a plane to get him, because he has to see something (anyone want to bet it's the body of guy with something cryptic written on or around him in blood? I'll bet $100 it is, since that seems to be the Langdon special.)

Naturally, it is. But before we get to that, let me just point out that there is absolutely no organization, private or government, that can afford to use a sub-orbital shuttle to transport people. I'm sorry, nothing short of nuclear holocaust would inspire anyone to fly a single person halfway around the planet in a spacecraft without any profit.

So, the guy who meets our skill-less hero is basically Cheney-In-His-Wheelchair. He shows Langdon the requisite cryptic corpse, and does what any good novel character does: EVERYTHING WRONG!

He froze the location with science, which I'll accept given the setting, but certainly a scientist knows that freezing a corpse causes it and all the organic material around it to rupture at a cellular level. In other words, he destroyed evidence such as hair and skin. Then, although the freeze might have destroyed skin oil marks anyways, he and Langdon take some time to touch everything and disturb as much of the scene as possible, including the victim.

Now, through all of this, remember that the point of freezing the chamber is to preserve the scene. (To this end, I'll accept that he may have kept the room just above the rupture point, but I won't accept that either man would not realize that fiddling with all sorts of things with their bare hands and even moving and adjusting things is NOT good preservation procedure.)

Corpse disturbing done with, they go to the man's lab. You see, this corpse, of course, is a religious figure, but is also a quantum physicist.

Here is where I nearly screamed...