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Title: Some books are made in the end...
Review: ... and some are broken. The book's strengths (excellent pacing for much of the first half, an astonishing level of attention to detail of art and architecture) are overpowered in the climax by a series of questionable coincidences concocted to make the implausible conclusion have any sense of narrative cohesion. This isn't Tom Clancy, where you can suspend disbelief and pretend that one man can indeed stop nuclear war if only he is on the telephone at the correct time, no, it beggars the imagination. For a book which seems impressively researched, there are errors in Catholic theology (from who is eligible to be elected Pope to the Church's rationale for celibacy) and particle physics (too numerous to mention) which could have been caught by running the text past one of the undergraduate students of the main character. Profoundly disappointing.
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