Negative Positive
Title: Been there, done that. . . Way too familiar
Review: Not a terrible book, but it's marred by the feeling of familiarity -- it's been done by better writers (Ken Follett, Jack Higgins, others) and seems not just derivative but sort of rote. The author is a workmanlike prose stylist with a tendency to overuse big words; the characters are pretty thin and not so easy to identify with. The author's first book at least had the virtue of a setting (inside a Swiss bank) that we hadn't really seen much of before. This one's OK, but I recommend instead getting a copy of "Eye of the Needle."
Is the review positive or negative? 