By Brad Meltzer
Let me start off a bit off topic. I don't like cooking breakfast. Oh, I eat breakfast; cereal or oatmeal, fruit. But to cook eggs, bacon, pancakes etc. No. It's not that I don't like them it's just that for the amount of time it takes to cook breakfast compared to how long it takes to eat it, it just doesn't seem worth it. If I'm going to cook "breakfast" I'll make it for dinner. It seems ok to spend more time cooking dinner than it takes to eat it.
Why do I mention this? Well I wonder if Brad Meltzer feels this way. The Book of Fate is 613 pages. I would imagine that just the writing took many months. Meltzer mentions that some of the research took 3 years. I read this book in 4 days. Is that a let down to the author? To me the reader this was no let down. In fact, Book of Fate was such a gripping story that I couldn't stop reading. All my free time was spent reading, following Wes as he tries to piece together what happened 8 years ago on the day there was an assassination attempt on the President of the United States and he took a bullet to the face.
Much like the last Brad Meltzer book I read, The Zero Game, Book of Fate has character twists that leave you wondering who's on which side. The back of the book mentions that Wes' search will take him back to the secrets of the Freemasons. I anticipated a National Treasure
type story. I feel that the back cover was a bit misleading. The Freemason's are vaguely referenced in a way that really has nothing to do with the plot. There is a code used by the President that he lifted from the Freemason's.
So what about the plot. Well the President and his entourage are attacked by a lone gunman as they exit their limo at a NASCAR event. One of the President's advisers dies. Another is injured (our main character, Wes.) Fast forward 8 years and Wes sees the dead man alive. What follows in his quest to unravel the mystery. He is being followed by FBI, CIA, and Secret Service Agents. Are they there to help or hinder? Just how far up the chain of command does the mystery go?
As long as you don't expect the story to steer into the realm of secret societies I think that you will enjoy this suspenseful tale.
