www.nickhodge.com

This week: Sydney / Lake Maquarie / Sydney / Auck­land / Sydney.

Fin­ished my third Dan Brown book, Decep­tion Point. What is the Dan Brown Code? Simple:

1. Slighly off-centre, strange yet handsome/beautiful primary char­ac­ter gets thrown into a “situation”.
2. The “situ­ation” has an echo in mod­ern cul­ture con­spir­acy the­or­ies or edge-case sci­ence fact
3. The ant­ag­on­ist is the per­son closest to the primary char­ac­ter, or primary character’s new love-interest
4. Cut chapters just short and leave the char­ac­ters hanging. Forces the reader to “read on” and not put the book down
5. Weave in some sci­ence fic­tion or myth as the cent­ral theme
6. Obvi­ously, the story ends with the primary char­ac­ter “win­ning” (happy end­ing) and scor­ing with their love-interest on the last page.

As a reader of Lud­lum, Clancy and other thrillers, Dan Brown is miss­ing some their “meat”. Maybe this is the nature of mod­ern, post cold-war thrillers where the Soviets/China are no longer the cent­ral enemy?