Brokaw, Charles: The Lucifer Code

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The Lucifer Code is the second book by Charles Brokaw featuring Thomas Lourds as an action-hero academic with an implausibly encyclopedic memory--think Dan Brown's Robert Langdon and you won't go far wrong. The similarity to Dan Brown's oeuvre doesn't end with the protagonist: the fate of the world is at stake; there's a secret religious society guarding an ancient religious relic that needs finding and translating; and Professor Lourds will manage in a few weeks to crack the code that others have failed to do for some 800 years. Unfortunately, Lourds is unlike Dan Brown's hero in that he has the libido of a seventeen-year-old boy. Lourds' interest in the opposite sex is, one assumes, meant to imply sexiness, but he just comes off as middle-aged smarmy, like you might want to wash your hands after shaking his. The book comes close to being a good read, but misses the mark for me. The plot is kind of tired at this point. There's a potentially great villain, but he winds up mostly being wasted. Huge revelations are dropped on us without fanfare. A book's worth of sexual tension is brought to an anticlimactic climax. The ending is weirdly truncated. I'm afraid Professor Lourds has not won me over as he has most of the women who cross his path.