The Gaudi Key [Paperback]

I enjoyed The Da Vinci Code, and preferred Angels & Demons, so thought this book, as it's of a similar ilk, would be fab.

How wrong I was. I abandoned the book several times because I realised I just didn't care what was going to happen next. The characters are flat and dull, and I didn't particularly like them.

Nothing flowed, and although the clues were clever, they weren't laid out in such a way that you'd try and solve them. It was all force-fed to you.

The ending was awful too. I was hoping for a really satisfying ending to tie everything up, but it was just rubbish. There's nothing redeeming about this book at all. The sense of urgency and intrigue just wasn't there for me, and it doesn't look like I'm the only one...

I tend not to slate books because I know how difficult it is to get accepted. But I'm breaking that rule on this one. The Gaudi Key is dire. Although it's translated from the Catalan, we can't blame the translator. I cannot fathom how this was accepted in the first place; someone at Harper should be thoroughly ashamed of foisting this onto the public. It might be telling that there are no review quotes, even translated ones. In the final analysis, this is an ideal book for writing tutors to use - to show how not to construct a book.
The characters are flat and never engage the reader, because the writers clearly were more involved in the puzzle posed to the heroine Maria rather than fleshing out individuals. There are pages crammed with characters' speech - exposition downloaded from textbooks or other sources; and one character has the nerve to say, 'I hope I'm not boring you.' Well, sadly, the writers bored me with their treatise disguised as a thriller. Part 3 is no less than thirty pages of a history lesson, with the Templars thrown in for good measure. Maria is the main character - yet there are ninety consecutive pages when she doesn't appear!
In many scenes the character point of view shifts from one to another and often we haven't a clue who is speaking; it's as if the writers don't care, they just want to spout the information out of their puppets' mouths. An entire chapter is given over to the villains plotting, but we're not shown anything, it's just one speech after another.
Visualisation in tense scenes is important so the reader can see what's happening - but it rarely exists in this book's pages. The heroes are apprehended in the hallway when in the next breath they're in another room - how'd they get there? Maria could feel the breath of the villain on her back - yet he held her captive at sword-point: that's a very powerful pair of lungs he has. And the villain escapes, but how he does it isn't shown - 'the man had disappeared.' (Must be a magician, then). Maria thinks that 'her grandfather had never hurt anyone.' Fine, though this is only forty pages after she read her grandfather's confession that when he was a youth he killed and beheaded an evil opponent... That must have hurt, surely? Then the couple wandered round 'for the rest of the afternoon'; only some eight pages later they're somewhere else and it was five in the afternoon; maybe that should have been evening, since the rest of the afternoon was spent wandering? Do I care?
There is very little in the way of description, save when these puppets are discussing architecture. The whole thing is contrived: the good guys and the villains know almost everything but leave it to Maria to solve the final riddle; the fight at the end is soulless and unconvincing. I'm really sorry to be so brutal, but clearly this is a good idea that has been squandered.

Having already bought the book, then read the reviews I was a little concerned that I'd not enjoy it at all. However I DID enjoy the book. IT seems that the only way of classifying this type of book is comparing it to 'The Da Vinci Code': so here goes- the story is similar and the pace similar too. The characters are developed just as much as the DVC but the ending is not as unsatisfactory. OK so there may be a few holes in the plot but all in all it is a good read.