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kestrellsubtitled: What to read instead of Dan Brown's _Inferno_
Set in Venice, _The Abomination_ is an action-packed conspiracy thriller which features two strong female protagonists: Kat, a captain in the Italian military police who is working her first homicide, and Holly, an American Army intelligence officer who just arrived at her new post in Venice.
Holly's first day at work involves what she thinks is just an annoying paperwork task, but soon she realizes that there is much more going on....something involving old secrets which someone doesn't want to see the light of day.
Kat and Holly also find themselves getting entangled with a notorious hacker who has created an online world called Carnivia, which is a virtual representation of the city of Venice itself, and, as in a number of Walter Jon Williams's most recent novels, this virtual world reflects many of the cultural tensions of the realtime world upon which it is based.
Holt obviously did a tremendous amount of research for this thriller, and his characters come across as believable, flawed but sympathetic. _The Abomination_ has not one but two female protagonists who are both literally kickass characters, but are also complex modern women in male-dominated professions, where sexism creates just as many complications for them as criminal activities. More than once I found myself checking that this book had been written by a male author, which I realize reflects my own personal bias, but hey, as a female reader I have had my heart broken more than a few times by male authors who promised me a strong independent woman who soon turned out to be a brain-numb nympho with improbable breasts who had to be rescued by her much stronger and smarter boyfriend.
I didn't actually finish Dan Brown's new novel, _Inferno_, but I did get somewhere between halfway to two-thirds of the way through it before being so completely icked out by the characterizations of female characters that I had to stop. It's an interesting thing about the three female characters in _Inferno_: the good women are distinguished by the fact that they reallyreallyreally want to have children. On the other hand, if you are born female and a genius, this will totally mess you up psychologically, including making your hair fall out and causing you to be so confused by normal human emotions and relationships that you will remain a virgin until you are in your thirties, at which time you will likely fall for a sociopathic geneticist who claims there is evidence supporting Malthus's theory of overpopulation so, despite your medical training and your supposed grasp of logic, you will play Pinky to his Brain and join him in instigating a pandemic which will solve the world overpopulation problem, and somewhere in there there will be some really superficial references to Dante's _Inferno_.
But I'm not going to rant about Dan Brown's writing, promise.
Set in Venice, _The Abomination_ is an action-packed conspiracy thriller which features two strong female protagonists: Kat, a captain in the Italian military police who is working her first homicide, and Holly, an American Army intelligence officer who just arrived at her new post in Venice.
Holly's first day at work involves what she thinks is just an annoying paperwork task, but soon she realizes that there is much more going on....something involving old secrets which someone doesn't want to see the light of day.
Kat and Holly also find themselves getting entangled with a notorious hacker who has created an online world called Carnivia, which is a virtual representation of the city of Venice itself, and, as in a number of Walter Jon Williams's most recent novels, this virtual world reflects many of the cultural tensions of the realtime world upon which it is based.
Holt obviously did a tremendous amount of research for this thriller, and his characters come across as believable, flawed but sympathetic. _The Abomination_ has not one but two female protagonists who are both literally kickass characters, but are also complex modern women in male-dominated professions, where sexism creates just as many complications for them as criminal activities. More than once I found myself checking that this book had been written by a male author, which I realize reflects my own personal bias, but hey, as a female reader I have had my heart broken more than a few times by male authors who promised me a strong independent woman who soon turned out to be a brain-numb nympho with improbable breasts who had to be rescued by her much stronger and smarter boyfriend.
I didn't actually finish Dan Brown's new novel, _Inferno_, but I did get somewhere between halfway to two-thirds of the way through it before being so completely icked out by the characterizations of female characters that I had to stop. It's an interesting thing about the three female characters in _Inferno_: the good women are distinguished by the fact that they reallyreallyreally want to have children. On the other hand, if you are born female and a genius, this will totally mess you up psychologically, including making your hair fall out and causing you to be so confused by normal human emotions and relationships that you will remain a virgin until you are in your thirties, at which time you will likely fall for a sociopathic geneticist who claims there is evidence supporting Malthus's theory of overpopulation so, despite your medical training and your supposed grasp of logic, you will play Pinky to his Brain and join him in instigating a pandemic which will solve the world overpopulation problem, and somewhere in there there will be some really superficial references to Dante's _Inferno_.
But I'm not going to rant about Dan Brown's writing, promise.
