The Da Vinci Legacy [Paperback]

I don't think it has escaped anyone's notice that Purdue's publishers, sitting on a cache of awful books for the last twenty years, became aware that Dan Brown's similarly -named and -themed book had skyrocketed to the top of the bestseller charts. "Hey," the must have thought to themselves. "We have some books that just might sell now that someone else has cracked the elusive Da Vinci conspiracy market." So Purdue's books were reissued (with an appropriate bump in retail price) and released upon an unsuspecting and gullible public. By which I mean me.

What the publishers failed to recognize, however, is that Dan Brown is able to tell a story with words on paper (he's a bad writer, but his storytelling skills are top-notch). Purdue, on the other hand, would have difficulty writing a Mad-lib and making it interesting.

It’s rare to come across a writer as ham-fisted and inept as Purdue, whose heroes are manly and capable, whose villains are purest evil and whose plotting is nearly non-existent. Vance Erickson, the main hero, is an everyday joe who just happens to be able to find oil where no one else can and who also just happens to be one of the world’s foremost amateur Da Vinci scholars. Lucky, then, that it is he and no other who comes across the bogus codex and recognizes it for what it is. Suzanne Storm is a reporter for a fluffy culture magazine who also happens to be a former CIA operative. In true hammy heroic fashion, the two, who initially can’t stand one another, fall in love after the first gun battle.

The villains are a band of excommunicated Catholic monks who seem to be behind every famous missing-persons case in history. They want the codex so they can work their nefarious evil by turning its contents into the most powerful weapon ever created. Apparently they were extremely competent until the present, when they keep conking Vance on the head and storing him in locked rooms from which he escapes easily, instead of just killing him. That’s the whole of the suspense in this book; Vance getting conked on the head and escaping.

In other areas, Purdue’s writing is just plain embarrassing to read. His exposition reads like he simply transcribed a Who’s Who entry. His romantic pronouncements are as real and heart-felt as a teenaged girl’s. His action sequences are so dull I had to physically restrain myself from flipping forward.

There are many, many better ways to spend your time than with this book. Try plucking all the hairs out of your arm with tweezers: it’s bound to be more interesting and rewarding than reading a Lewis Purdue novel.

Unfortunately the updating and editing is badly at fault in the modern (2004) edition - the publishing house should have edited it better or left Mr Purdue longer for rewriting! The background of the characters has been left unchanged, so that 'washboard stomach' Vance must be in his sixties and his boss Kingsbury around 100 years old (emigrated to the states in the 1920s etc.) whereas parts have been updated to take account of the Euro, 9/11 etc. If you have a vivid imagination this will annoy you - you have to keep revising the characters in your mind's eye to cope with this!

Stick to 'Daughter of God' - it's a better read by far!