What a totally disappointing book. Begun at 11:00 on a train and finished by the time I returned home at 6:00, it really is that thin despite the 500 or so pages.

The basic premise of the story is that a secret cult worships at Stonehenge or some other underground version of it and requires sacrifices. They obtain sacrifices; the police become involved; that's it. Secret cults... Ancient settings... an academic unwittingly involved in their machinations. Did someone give Sam Christer the how-to-write-a-Dan-Brown-novel kit for Christmas?

Chapters rarely extended more than 2 pages and there was almost no development of setting, visualisation or atmosphere within them; the plot really is paper thin to non-existent; every so-called twist was so patently obvious and clumsily handled that everything was predictable. What can save a poorly plotted novel is character. The novel as a genre gifts to the writer the space needed to create characters who are three-dimensional, realistic, capable of being identified with and emphathised with. Christer didn't even try.

And for some unknown reason Christer decided to write in the present tense. Why? It added nothing to the plot; it could have made visual descriptions more vivid, but he hadn't included any; it was just, well, odd!

Overall:
A good pace meant that I didn't waste more than a day on the book;
Derivative premise, under-developed characters, no atmosphere, no tension, no style did mean that it was a day totally wasted!