Much of this story focuses on Gabrielle Ashe, his aide, who is blackmailed by Margorie Tench over her affair with him. I should at this point mention Deception Point’s substantive subplot, which is about Rachel’s father, Senator Sedgwick Sexton, the presidential candidate. Admittedly I found Michael Tolland pretty forgettable and dull, and was a little frustrated that so much of the story was told from his POV, but it didn’t detract from the plot. Rachel is well-realised, as is Margorie Tench, Pickering and the ill-fated Norah Mangor. It’s plot-driven through and through, but that’s not to say its characters are not interesting. The action scenes are well written and the twists well-executed, particularly the revelation of William Pickering as the conspiracy’s mastermind. Furthermore, they would probably be inexplicable in this kind of story, which has a large ensemble of characters and a lot of complicated stuff going on. If we were forced to stay in one character’s head during all the action scenes, they’d take twice as long to tell. Rather, they serve the plot well because they speed things up. At no point do the perspective shifts ruin the action. And doing this multiple times mid-scene is even worse because it distances the reader from the action and the characters.ĭeception Point makes me doubt these rules. Brown doesn’t ‘head-hop’, because line breaks are used to indicate when he is changing perspective, but I’ve heard that doing this mid-scene is generally ill-advised because it breaks up the action. The story is told from the POV of many characters, often jumping in and out of different characters’ heads mid-scene. It’s packed with the usual conspiracy tropes – the protagonists’ steady unearthing of the truth, mysterious deaths (and some nasty ones too, such as death-by-ice-forced-down-the-throat!), exciting attacks by the conspirators’ henchmen, mysterious figures pulling the strings, red herrings and twists. Being a conspiracy fiction writer myself, these are the sorts of stories I’m drawn to. When the team finds an anomaly, eventually learning that the discovery is one massive fake, they quickly become the targets of a conspiracy. We learn that NASA has found a meteorite containing extraterrestrial fossils, and Rachel is part of a team sent to the Arctic to verify the discovery. Full spoilers for Deception Point ahead…ĭeception Point is about a government intelligence analyst called Rachel Sexton who is summoned by the President to help on a NASA discovery of enormous magnitude.
My extra blog for this week looks at Dan Brown’s 2001 novel, Deception Point, one of his few non-Robert Langdon tales.
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