I am going to be honest here. If I didn’t need to read this book for a bingo game I am playing, I would have quit this after a few chapters. It’s not a bad book or anything. It’s just a lot of stuff being thrown at you. I would also say that if you haven’t read works by Alexandre Dumas, Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes, and many others, you are going to be at a loss for some of the literary references that are tossed about in dialogue here and there. I think the only reason why I kept going was that I was very interested in who Irene Adler was (and yes, Sherlock Holmes reference) and the little bit of clues you get were great. But part of you wonders if she and the main character of Lucas Corso (just called Corso for the most part) are truly mad. The ending kind of gives you a clue, but it just feels a bit anticlimactic. Maybe it’s my fault since I saw the movie this book was based on, The Ninth Gate and I just thought it would be that. But it’s not. So most of my reading time was like this is new, this is new, this is new. I wonder if it would have made the movie stronger if it had followed more of the Dumas trail? For me this was just a solid three stars and that was it.
