Crusader Gold by David Gibbins, I'll start off by saying that I'm into this kind of subject, I love medieval history and everything that includes fact and fiction attracts me, so naturally, I wanted to give it a try, especially after Atlantis which was a very interesting work. The first pages get you in a sort of euphoria after the magnificent introduction of the Roman procession, getting you all hyped up for the next pages. The first scenes continued the line but it soon got really slow and you kept turning the pages to simply skip the tedious descriptions. The aisberg scene inside was really confusing and you couldn't really make ends meet out of it. Deep in the story, if anyone has read it before, the finding with Halvdan seriously made me cringe and start laughing. In the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, there's an old runic inscription, and it reads Halvdan, and this guy now is one of the main motives of the plot. Please... As the plot progresses, it gets bogged down even more and there's no real flow towards it and you simply can't enjoy it. One EXTREMELY annoying part about the book is that he gets all obsessed about technical stuff, describing them in the smallest details and it doesn't take long before you start skipping big chunks or even pages. The main character resembles Dirk Pitt way too much except that he appears to be a tad more "intelligent" or "scholarly" to put it like that. It really is a sort of "pseudo-history" lesson, and if it wasn't for all the textbook reading it could have simply narrowed down to less than 200 pages out of the 480. If it was for Tom Clancy he could have easily pulled it off, but David Gibbins still has a loooong way to go before he reaches that kind of writing level. Somehow I really don't get it what happened to his writing. I enjoyed Atlantis, full of adventure and less history, but now since he got to a historical context there's basically no adventure and too much history. Not to mention a wild idea that Viking explorers died in the weirdest place possible. There's nothing really bad about it or really good, it's just a book that you have read and afterwards you say "Meh, whatever". It doesn't make any Grade: 4 out of 10. Why 4, why so low? Plus - good historical accuracy, he enjoyed his research it seems - really good prologue - interesting plot idea Minus - slow pace - gets bogged down in too much technical stuff and jargon which you won't enjoy if you don't know - although the idea is good, how it develops in the end isn't too interesting - bad ending, it left it somehow dangling at the end of a pole or severed with Halvdan's axe
