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. ( )

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." ( )

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?? ( )

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mystery, romance and danger revolving around antiquarian Harry Blake, seems to lifted ad verbatim from the pages of an unpublished Brown scenario.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. ( )

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. ( )