Customer Reviews

The Da Vinci Legacy (Signed)

5 star:		(36)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(17)

 

 

This book is filled with moments that made me wonder, "could this be true?" The strange brotherhood (all the bloodline of St. Peter) is reasonably rooted in the battles over the papcy and the dueling Popes that enlivened church history.

I found the brotherhood's graveyard (with the final resting places of some very famous artists and scientists) to be at least as believable as the parallel in Da Vinci Code. Only for my dollar, I think that Perdue makes for more interesting action, but then that is a personal preference of mine and is no slam at the better-selling Da Vinci book which I read and enjoyed.

Quite frankly, I resent the people who have posted vicious reviews here that paint Perdue's writing as the anti-Christ or something just because his style does not appeal to them. I prefer his style, but I think it would just be simply mean and petty to go post reviews trashing Dan Brown just because his style isn't my style.

These reviews should help people select a book book that fits their taste and not be a forum for grudge posts which do not add to that.

With that said, I need to say that I found Da Vinci Legacy well-written although not as well as Perdue's most recent ones, Daughter of God and Slatewiper. On the other hand, Perdue has had 20 years to improve as a writer. Personally, I cannot wait until I can find a new book by him.

I read this book after reading in papers that serious discussion are going whether Dan Brown had used it as base for his book.

Maybe, - rather for sure - Brown has read this book and found some detail interesting but I cannot find more common in these two books than in any other two spy/war/romance stories.

Apart from this I found the new edition a little bit weird. The original release was in 1983 and the whole story is built on this, but in the new release you found some detail had been updated.

* hero pays in Euro (no Euro till 2002)

* hero's memories about the Iraq war (no such war in the coming 10 years)

* Enron scandal

* terrorist attack on New York (2001)

so I simply don't understand why does Perdue rewrote some part and left all the others in place, like cold war (great fear that Russia will have the secret weapon), communist party in Italy, etc.??????

All togeher the book is an interesting one, but not an exceptional. Above mistakes makes it only for a two star for me. Not as page turner as The Da Vinci Code.

If you find spiritual thrillers appealing-- those books that mix excitement and suspense with interesting ethical and moral issues, you can't pass this one up. I also read Perdue's Daughter of God and loved that novel. It is obvious both books have been thoroughly researched and that the characters present controversial insights about church history and moral ambiguity. So many mysteries or novels of suspense are just a matter of dead bodies and clues with little that sticks with you, a novel of substance always stands out. There is no question that there are some curious correspondences to Dan Brown's book which I also read-- particularly curious in that these books were published long before his book. Still, this is a great story that needs no comparison to anything. It is fascinating, absorbing, and involving.

I read the Da Vinci Code a short time ago and loved it. I'm a Da Vinci fan, so any fun action-adventure based on concepts revolving around Da Vinci would interest me. I'm just glad I found this at a thrift store for .75 cents.

The pace is labored, the characters are not developed and so far I could care less about the hero. The author uses certain words too much, I guess he thinks it makes him sound intelligent. (I just keep thinking of that scene from "The Princess Bride" "You keep using that word...I don't think it means what you think it means...")

I'm in the 7th chapter and so far the supposedly "brilliant" hero is acting like an idiot. He goes to meet someone, is early, so decides to spend time before his meeting doing something else, like drinking. This happens three times with disasterous results and still he doesn't learn his lesson. Worse, the author uses the same phrase to bridge the event. It's like, damn, here we go again, his friend is gonna get killed because he didn't show up early.

Another annoying thing is the bad guy. The first chapter, which introduced him, was pretty good. It showed promise. But it goes down hill from there. The bad guy's reason for hating the hero is absolutely stupid. And we are not given the opportunity to hate this evil person for ourselves. Instead we're told we should hate him and shown some reasons why. All at once. I would have preferred to learn about this crazy, evil person a little bit at a time as the story goes on, to have his lunatic ways revealed as the story progresses. But no, bam, here is a nut case, hate him. Oh well.

I hoped this would be at least as engrossing as Dan Brown's work, but it's not, I'm sorry to say. Which is unfortunate, because I was planning on reading his "Daughter of God" after this one, but if this is Perdue's style, I can leave it easily. I guess I'll read Dan Brown's "Angels and Demons" instead.

I first learned about Perdue back in the 1980s when I read a bestseller of his called the Delphi Betrayal.

Anyway, Perdue had a couple more bestsellers, including The Da Vinci Legacy then seemed to disappear until The Linz Testament came out. That one read pretty much like the Da Vinci Code, but when Daughter of God came out, I was hooked again, both on the subject matter (pretty much like Linz) and the writing style (his best until Slatewiper).

Picking up Da Vinci Legacy was like meeting an old friend after a couple of decades apart. Perdue writes better now than he did like 20 years ago, but this book is no slouch in that department.

The chase through the wine cellar and the shootout in Milan's fashion district were gripping, but I have to say the hand-to-hand fight on the leaning tower of Pisa is my favorite thriller scene for any thriller by any author at any time.

I love this guy's writing and, quite frankly think that the people trashing the writing style have never actually read the book. I notice they leave no plot details at all. They write as if they have an agenda they don't hide very well at all.

Essentially, I put novels in three categories. First, there are a very small number of books that transcend and that you think about for a long time. You read other books and wonder why they couldn't be more like those in this special category. Second, there are books that come into your life, stay with you for a little, and then leave you with fond feelings and modest memories. Third, there are books that simply make you dumber, or if not make you dumber, make you long you'd reached for something - anything! - else from the bookshelf. Almost every book I read is in the second category. I love books. I find something to like in almost all of them. This book, I'm afraid, is in the third category.

The first problem is the editing. Originally released in the early 80s, there was apparently a dramatic rush back to the printer and the shelves while Dan Brown's DaVinci Code still has coattails. Unfortunately, this wrecks havoc with the book. Rather than leaving it set in 1983, the author and/or editor took a very cursory run at attempting to update it. Accordingly, the book now takes place "ten years" after September 11, 2001. There are references to that date and the tragic events of it, as some sort of shorthand way for making you think the book is current. Unfortunately, they forgot to change the rest of it. Accordingly, the President of the United States is still Ronald Regan, people who are about 50 in the book were born in the 1930s (according to their background), computers are very rudimentary and still have green screens, and there are about a million other cues to let you know it is 1980. Oh - I almost forgot, the fact that there is a cold war ongoing with the Russians also serves as a backdrop.

This problem, though, is merely distracting, and pales in comparison to the other problems. First, the plot is so idiotic and implausible that it caused me to laugh out loud in places. If the plot were simply a Macguffin to create an excuse for the action, that would be one thing, but it isn't -- it takes itself completely seriously. Moreover, the action sequences are absurd. There are (no lie) about ten sequences that are the exact same, and pretty much described the exact same way. (In each, there are at least two circumstances of "bullets ripping" into whatever object -- wall, snowbank, water -- happens to be right next to our unlikable hero and heroine.)

The big-bad-corporate-bad-guy premise is, in a word, sophomoric. (Ok, three words -- sophomoric, unconvincing, and uninteresting.) Perhaps it suffers from the fact that the book I read just before it, John Le carre's The Constant Gardner, did a very nice job at the worldwide-corporate-conglomorate-bad guy, and so DaVinci suffers by comparison. Minor kudos for the nice marriage of religious zealots and corporate america, but emphasis on "minor."

I've got a bunch more negative stuff to say about this book. Dropped plot lines, silly devices that simply trick instead of allowing you to discover, entirely undeveloped important characters, etc. I realize, though, that I'm starting to sound like a jerk. I like books. Really. I almost never take the effort to post a review on amazon, and when I do, I'm usually positive. But I was angry when I finished this one. I know it's just one man's opinion and others of you really seem to like this book, but in a world where there are a thousand times more books to read than we'll ever have time to read, this one strikes me as a waste.

After a trip to Milan last summer, I have been intrigued by Leonardo Da Vinci. There is a museum there that has many working models of Leonardo's inventions and some extensive discussion of the far-thinking creations of this mega-genius, things like helicopters, parachutes, the breech-loading cannon and other things that would need to wait centuries before mere mortals and their technology could catch uo so that the inventions could be built.
This was what I found most intriguing about The Da Vinci Legacy: That -- like he did with the helicopter etc. -- Leonardo might have some observation or idea that could provide the missing link in modern-day-thinking to perfect some awesome weapon. All of this is very convincingly laid out and mixes history and speculation seamlessly, especially in the creative centerpiece that the Codex Leicester plays.
While I did enjoy the sections on religion, popes, art and so forth that were startlingly reminiscent of Da Vinci Code, I enjoyed the history and the Leonardo sections the most.
I read and enjoyed Perdue's Daughter of God, but I liked Da Vinci Legacy's Vance Erikson and Suzanne Storm much better than the Ridgeways that serve as hero and heroine, respectively in Daughter of God.
There are a number of "over the top" things in Da Vinci Legacy, but I think Perdue gives us enough historical and scientific justification to make them believable. All of this in a book that reads quickly and easily and holds interest while making a point in the background

Da Vinci scholar Vance Erikson discovers a forgery and missing pages in a Da Vinci Codex that makes his a target of a mysterious Catholic brotherhood who has killed four other Da Vinci scholars.

The murders take Erikson on a fast-paced sprint through Europe one step ahead of the killers and the law who have fingered him as the killer of at least one of the dead da davinci scholars, Dr. Martini who has written his last message in his own blood.

Erikson hooks up with an undercover CIA agent whose cover is as a fine arts expert. Together they solve the mystery.

This book is well-written and, according to Perdue's message board had some of the very dated 1983 references updated. I did not find the body count any higher than other good thrillers in the genre.

After reading Daughter of God, I happened over this book, apparently published some 20 years ago.

But given the interest in Da Vinci, art, religion, Vatican secrets etc. I picked this one up and totally enjoyed it. Perdue could write well even back then.

I particularly enjoyed the scenes around Lago di Como in Italy. It's a favorite place of mine and Perdue describes them so beautifully it made me miss it!

One of the scenes describing all the famous people associated with the mysterious anti-Vatican Brotherhood was fascinating as was the whole interaction with the global corporations.

Made me wonder whether this was really happening in some way.

OK, first the criticism. The cover admits that the book was first published in 1983 and obviously it was "updated" before it was re-released. Those updates sometimes don't ring true. We have reference to 9/11 and then something about it happening 12 years ago. It does throw off the chronology a bit. Yes, the book is riding on the coat tails of the Da Vinci Code, but that's just good old marketing making money off of a hot topic. (Hey, it worked, I had read the Da Vinci Code and I picked it up to read on a business trip.) And the book does not have the feel to me of having been extensively researched like the Da Vinci Code. It doesn't immerse you in details, it's more of an action book.

But now on to the good things.

Lewis Perdue has woven a good who donit based on the generally accepted knowledge that Leonardo was brilliant far past his time. Someone has stolen certain pages from one of his manuscripts and doesn't particularly care who's killed to get them back. Our hero is a bit unbelievable. Let's see he works for an oil company finding new oil fields, but his employer lets him moonlight as a da Vinci expert. In his guise of da Vinci expert he suddenly finds that everyone who has looked at the manuscript is dead or being hunted down, including him. He picks up a romantic interest in the guise of an art magazine writer who just happens to be an ex CIA operative. What follows is a whirl wind race around Italy dodging evil corporate heads, discredited monks, and terrorists.

OK, when I write all that out it does sound preposterous, but remember, this is fiction.

My star ratings:

One star - couldn't finish the book
Two stars - read the book, but did a lot of skipping or scanning. Wouldn't add the book to my permanent collection or search out other books by the author
Three stars - enjoyable read. Wouldn't add the book to my permanent collection. Would judge other books by the author individually.
Four stars - Liked the book. Would keep the book or would look for others by the same author.
Five start - One of my all time favorites. Will get a copy in hardback to keep and will actively search out others by the same author.