368 pages
English language
Published May 2, 2005 by Harvest Books.
About to depart on his first vacation in years, Edward Wozny, a hot-shot young investment banker, is sent to help one of his firm's most important and mysterious clients. When asked to uncrate and organize a personal library of rare books, Edward's indignation turns to intrigue as he realizes that there may be a unique medieval codex hidden among the volumes, a treasure kept locked away for many years and for many reasons. As friends draw Edward into a peculiar and addictive computer game, his obsession deepens as he discovers surprising parallels between the game's virtual reality and the mystery of the codex. An accomplished and entertaining thriller, Codex explores the mysterious power of books in the medieval and modern ages.
This was a fair mystery; although the ending seemed convoluted and incomplete. The saddest of all is that the novel had the potential to be quite mysterious and intriguing.
The Magician series is much better, inventive, and a better investment of time.
Meandering and meaningless, there are some really beautiful bits of book here. I think if you keep your expectations low (as I did going into it), you might find this enjoyable.
The characters are paper thin, and the main character especially, swings wildly from incompetence to thinking himself near genius (though we have only some flimsy back story as evidence for this opinion).
The central plot revolves around an improbable quest dolled out to the hero for mysterious (and no doubt nefarious) purposes, to procure a mid-evil era manuscript. This actually does resolve itself fairly interestingly, and about the last third or fourth of the novel becomes pretty easy to get sucked into. (That's about the point at which I read to completion in one late-night sitting.)
But the thing I found most interesting was a strange and beautifully depicted video game, seemingly transplanted into the novel, and which the …
Meandering and meaningless, there are some really beautiful bits of book here. I think if you keep your expectations low (as I did going into it), you might find this enjoyable.
The characters are paper thin, and the main character especially, swings wildly from incompetence to thinking himself near genius (though we have only some flimsy back story as evidence for this opinion).
The central plot revolves around an improbable quest dolled out to the hero for mysterious (and no doubt nefarious) purposes, to procure a mid-evil era manuscript. This actually does resolve itself fairly interestingly, and about the last third or fourth of the novel becomes pretty easy to get sucked into. (That's about the point at which I read to completion in one late-night sitting.)
But the thing I found most interesting was a strange and beautifully depicted video game, seemingly transplanted into the novel, and which the main character gets rather hopelessly (and a characteristically) addicted to for the duration of the novel's timeframe (a few weeks). It's not really realistically depicted, though probably enough so for non- (or casual) gamers, but the plot of the game, when it's finally revealed, is pretty interesting. I would probably have rather read an entire novelization of its contents than the rest of the book, to be honest.
