Title: Novel as longwinded puzzle
Product review: The author leverages an intriguing possibility about the life of Jesus and suffocates it under the flimsiest of characters, a thick layer of explication on the sacred feminine, two tons of cliches and a plot with timing so perfect that if the protagonist had stopped to take a pee, the entire novel would have collapsed. Somewhere around page 20 I numbly realized the author wasn't even trying to give each character his own dialogue; conversations only serve to drive the plot 80 miles an hour to the end of this longwinded puzzle. And that's all there is to the "Code": riddles and word games wrapped around a framework of a lite detective story. (I understand the author's next work involves the same code expert in "Buddha Belly", where clues written on fortune cookies point to evidence that the supposed-vegetarian Enlightened One had a weakness for barbecued goat ribs.)
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