==Characters==
The characters are what you'd expect them to be. Everyone besides our hero act like idiots and can't crack the puzzles. Unless an actual emergency comes along, such as gunfire, at which point the author goes into great detail on how the protagonist just stands there and shakes. And how everyone else has to suffer besides him. And yes, our hero is portrayed as the humble stud of the universe yet again.
Besides the fact that Langdon is a walking library, a popular old bachelor (usually an 'ew' factor, but not in his case, of course) he also knows how to read Latin (of course). You'd think that by the time the third novel arrives, our hero would develop other characteristics, new flaws, but everything stays the same. Probably out of the author's idea that escaping the Mary Sue category would mean loss of fans.
The female lead character is just like the others in the first two books - young, smart looking, slender, has no flaws and doesn't take any of Langdon's crap (again, I mean until the very end). For some reason the female characters are never already in a relationship with anyone else, thus making our hero the luckiest bastard on the face of the Earth.
==When the action finally arrives==
The book seems like a complete snooze-fest, but it gets much better, provided you can keep reading until the last 70 or so pages. Things pick up, finally, and the characters have to deal with the villain head-on and crack the puzzle. At this point the book was actually enjoyable to read. Seeing Langdon himself in a real predicament that could actually kill him on the spot was refreshing. But sadly, he can never die seeing as Brown stated that he has the intention of writing many more books starring our jaded detective-for-hire.
The novel really makes up for all the boring stuff it has hurled at us in the first part. The puzzles are interesting to try and solve yourself, the action is alert and the characters split for the finish, trying to get the bad guy off their back.
