I got to page 138, which was many more than I really wanted to read, but I kept hoping it would get better. I gave the Da Vinci Code 4 stars, and now I wonder why. Was it really that much better than this one? Or maybe instead my tolerance for mediocre popular fiction has decreased. 
 At the point I stopped, I encountered 4 live characters. None of them intrigued me or interested me, except for maybe the hit man (Hassassin). The rest felt cookie-cutterish and dull. I don't care about the religion versus science plot, whether Dan Brown is incorporating actual, documented facts into his fiction, or whether it is all just fiction. None of it matters to me, and therefore it's time to put this book down.