Bill NapierBesprekingen

Bill Napier, author of "Shattered Icon", seems to be trying to be Britain's answer to Dan Brown, author of the super-success "The Da Vinci Code".
There are many similarities between "Shattered Icon" and "The Da Vinci Code". The story is very fast-moving, the hero and heroine are well-educated people with specialised historical knowledge, and the plot is based on events related to the Catholic church that happened long ago.
When I started the book I was swept along by the fast-paced action and was enjoying the idea of an encrypted 400-year-old journal. But as I continued reading I realised that the story was not very believable. By the time I got to the end, I could see holes in the plot that were big enough to drive a bus through.
If you're willing to totally suspend your disbelief and go along for the ride, then this is lots of fun. But if a plot that doesn't make sense and characters that are fairly two-dimensional reduce your enjoyment of a book, then you should look elsewhere.

Well, this book is a surprise (using some advanced physics).

Looking for ZPE (Casimir effect http://www.mit.edu/~kardar/research/seminars/Casimir/Casimir1948.pdf , here is (on page 154 of the Dutch translation) a connection with the Foucalt pendulum ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foucault_pendulum ).


https://www.ias.edu/video/negative-energy-quantum-information-and-causality

https://opc-kb.oclc.org/DB=1/SET=1/TTL=1/CMD?ACT=SRCHA&IKT=1016&SRT=YOP&... kern bill napier KB.nl
https://www.boekbeschrijvingen.nl/napier-bill/napier.html Duth translations

Not great literature, just escapism, easy to read, didn't take me long to get through it. Sort of in the same vein as "The Da Vinci Code."

This has been lying on my tbr mountain for ages and now I know why, after reading Nemesis and Shattered Icon I was really looking forward to this. I found it really disappointing, it wasn't the science that let the book down it was the rest of the story. When the George Bush clone is the most reasonable of the world leaders involved in the story then you know that you've got problems. Having said that I did read this in one sitting so it can't be that bad, I just think it suffers in comparison with his other books.

Nach gut einem Viertel abgebrochen. das Buch ist eher für Leute die schon Physik in der Schule toll fanden.
Dazu gehörte ich definitiv nicht. Seitenweise wissenschaftliches Geschwafel, null Spannung und sautrocken.½

Great story, an adventure and race against time to retrieve a religious artifact, a piece of the True Cross of Christ. This is the first book I have read, of this type, that sent you back in time with diaries that told of the journey to Roanoke Island with clues about the artifact. The present day was a historian on the trail of the artifact against bad guys and religious circles. It kept a certain pace, so you were kept interested and turning the page to see what happens. I am not a spoiler so you will have to read and see … Did they retrieve it?? Was a relic fake from the Crusades??

Lots of accurate science and some speculation when a special team of scientists at the site of an underground lake are bombarded with a message from outer space. Upon investigation by the math genius, it seems to have the structure of DNA and other information of great value, but politics and fear by various governments + a spy in their midst make it doubtful if the information will ever get out and threatens their lives. It had good descriptions and explored much of the history of contact with outer space phenomena.

What is this? I don't even... That's the best way to describe my experiences reading this book. I'm reminded of Dan Brown (the literary equivalent of a fast food diner) and Neal Stephenson (that small restaurant hidden in an alley where they serve the best steak in town), neither in a positive way. Napier's two storylines should work in tandem to tell a story, but he could have separated them into two different books and we would have been none the wiser. The first, a "riveting" tale of mystery, romance and danger revolving around antiquarian Harry Blake, seems to lifted ad verbatim from the pages of an unpublished Brown scenario. Scholar gets drawn into a mysterious plot to do [BAD DEED X] with [RELIGIOUS THINGY Y], but then he [RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD]. Sound familiar? I thought it would. And to make matters worse: while Brown's Mary Sue might be annoying, Napier's Blake is far superior in that particular field of study. The man is an antiquarian in a quaint English village and his reaction when getting stabbed, robbed, beaten and otherwise beset by evil agents of terror is to man up and go 007 on them. Seriously? You're trying to tell me Mr. Blake wouldn't be soiling his underwear and applying for the British equivalent of the Witness Protection Program? Or at the very least shoving the manuscript up his employer's tightest orifice with a note saying: "Thanks, but no thanks"? Shove a few deus ex machina moments in there and you have the recipe for the worst book I've read in the past year. The other storyline, a journal of a young man's voyage across the Atlantic, is better. But you know what? It's also the plot that gets the smallest amount of attention from Napier, seemingly serving no other purpose but to fill out pages. If Napier had focused on Mr. Ogilvie's voyage and its mysterious purpose, I would have been happy to rate this 3x times what I have rated this book now. All in all I am not inclined to try my hand at another Napier.

I don't usually read thrillers, but this one really held my interest. The real question this book poses is: Who and what can we trust? What do we know - or do we just think we know it?

I did not find the technical jargon off-putting. Maybe I read more science than the other reviewers, maybe I am better at reading past things I don't understand if they are not necessary to the plot. In hindsight I think that the technical language is supposed to be somewhat overpowering. What I did find troubling was the feeling from early on that details weren't quite right. Again, I think now that this was deliberate.

There is a lot more going on in this book than I expected when I started it.

This was a new author for me. I found the book hard to get into what with all of the technical jargon. Even with the plot twist at the end, I don't think I will read any more books by this author.

Summary: Harry Blake, antique map dealer from Lincoln, is called upon by a local member of the landed gentry to decipher an Elizabeth journal bequeathed to him by a long-lost Jamaican relative. When Sir Toby shows up dead and thugs have been chasing Harry around Oxford, he teams up with Sir Toby's feisty daughter and equally vivacious marine historian Zola Khan, along with Dalton, a mysterious man of indeterminate ethnicity, education and employment, to finish deciphering the journal and follow where it leads them.

This compares very favourably to a large number of this style of book which I read often, because:

a) the protagonist is an academic with a bit of army background, not an ex-SEAL now working for CIA/FBI, who ends up in a violent treasure hunt through his professional engagement rather than because he went looking for it

b) said protagonist is British (soooooooo many of these stories are US-based, and while I have no objection to that, it's nice to have a change!)

c) there is only one flight made at short notice, most of the rest of the travel is localised and thus plausible.

d) it's half the length of the genre standard so the plot is generally tighter.

e) 19-year-old heiresses are cool.

It fails on the same grounds that many do:

a) Zola Khan, the marine historian with the amazing classic car? Seriously?

b) Everyone seems to have a lot of fight training. I don't know any particularly combative academics apart from a rower or two.

Lots of fun, but I'd rather read a Clive Cussler. If someone convinces Cussler to write a UK-based thriller, I'll buy it in hardback on the first day.

I generally give books 100 pages before I decide to finish them. “Nemesis,” kept my attention on and off, but there were many times where I’d see how many pages I had to go before finishing, wishing I’d decided to put it down earlier. It’s not a bad book, but could have been shorter and much less convoluted.

Clearly its author, Bill Napier is a smart guy. And while it’s OK to have technical dialogue, mathematic formulas, etc., he really pushes the limit. He needs to read Crichton to get an understanding of the balance between too much techno-jargon and layman’s terms. Crichton always seemed to include a character that didn’t understand the technical goings on, so it would be explained so the rest of us would understand too. Napier goes for a too realistic scene where little is explained…until later…maybe.

This team of scientists are basically trying to identify an asteroid they believe has been forced off course by Russians into hitting America. The President has given them a deadline to identify the asteroid and come up with a plan to divert it from hitting Earth. Along the way, many of these individuals seem to be in no real hurry to find the answers. And Napier has this annoying habit of dropping you into a scene with no preamble. So it takes several pages before you realize where/when you are and what’s going on.

I think the core idea of this book, in the hands of someone like Crichton (well, he’s of course dead, but you know what I mean) would have been much better.

But then, that’s what you get when you buy a book for $1.25 at Dollar General…

This is a thriller written along the line of the DaVinci Code without a lot of the ciphers. At first, I wasn't terribly impressed. I found the dialogue a bit stilted and the plot unoriginal. It got better after the introduction of Ogilvie's journal. As a young Scotsman gives his view of historical events surrounding the struggle for power between Elizabethan England and Spain I found my interest sparked. Not my best read of this year, but not as bad as I first expected.½

Dan Brown has a lot to answer for, number one on the list being the plethora of "hunt for the holy relic" novels he spawned with the unbelievably popular The DaVinci Code. Not that Splintered Icon is a bad read: it's fun, enjoyable, and somewhat more believable than many of its cousins. And this particular take on the genre gives us a look at a relatively obscure (at least on this side of the pond) expedition to the New World featuring Sir Walter Raleigh, his cohorts, and a suspected Catholic plot against Queen Elizabeth. That alone makes this novel worth slogging through the unsurprising surprises and not-so-twisty twists of a done-to-death storyline. Or maybe I've just read too many of this type of novel. I do have a weakness for them, regardless of their familiarity.

Fluffy, but fun.

Face it folks...this book doesn't purport to be great literature, so don't look for it here!
So here's the deal...no, it's not another DaVinci Code, like the blurbs say, not that I ever would hold anything up to the DaVinci Code to measure its "worthiness" -- the DVC just isn't worth using as THE model for this kind of story. Splintered Icon is just a fun story to spend a few hours reading away. It is one of those fun kind of suspense-ish books that starts out like a bibliomystery that turns into a case of international intrigue that gets kind of silly. But that doesn't mean I wouldn't recommend it...if you just want a fun read and you see this one, pick it up and give it a try.

The basic plot:

Harry Blake is an antiquarian seller of books in England, and owns a little shop. His true passion, however, is collecting old maps, always hoping to find the big one that will fetch hundreds of thousands of pounds at Sotheby's. One day he is summoned to meet with Sir Toby Tebbit, local squire, who has, it seems, inherited a journal from the Jamaican side of the family, of whose existence he never knew. But as he looks through the journal, he realizes it's unreadable, so calls on good old Harry to decode the journal. The journal is written in a secret code popular during the time of Elizabeth I; but as Harry begins to work on the journal, he is offered a rather large price for the book by a complete stranger. Harry, being the impeccable man of scruples that he is, refuses. He realizes that he's going to need some help and turns to his friend Zola for assistance. In the meantime, Sir Toby is murdered and Harry realizes that the other group of people looking for the book will stop at nothing until they have it. Toby and Zola discover that the author of the journal has information that is very valuable.

What's really fun about this book is that you get to go back into history -- at the time of Sir Walter Raleigh -- and watch as a conspiracy unfolds on the high seas. All of this, of course, is what's embedded within the journal's pages. I was fascinated with the author's discussion of the history of the calendar, of John Dee being the first "secret agent" complete with the code name "007" and the history of a true plot against the throne of England by the Catholics.

I won't go into any more details here or it would truly wreck the story for someone who wants to read it. I liked Harry Blake, and I hope that Mr. Napier is planning to bring us more stories featuring this character.½