This book was compared on the jacket to The Da Vinci Code , The Name of the Rose and The Secret History. All I can say is; Donna Tartt and Umberto Eco must be furious: and I never thought I'd say this, but come back, Dan Brown, all is forgiven.
At least Dan Brown understands pace.

Tartt and Eco wear their erudition lightly, but their craft lies in the flow of the story, relatively unencumbered by detail which detracts from the events unfolding.

Caldwell and Thomason bombard you with detail: arcane too-clever-by-half detail: obsessive detail about life at Princeton: constant repetitions of poverty-stricken phraseology and unintentionally-grating use of colloquialisms.

I cannot remember how many times I cringed at the term "figure out" to explain how they variously computed something mathematically, understood an argument, recognised a reference or simply pondered deeply upon the meaning of life until they had come to some simple conclusion.

The word "okay" is similarly over-used considering the desire of the authors to demonstrate the scholarly erudition of their characters.
I laughed out loud when one of the major incidents of the book occurred- the murder of a student who is shot, and explodes backwards out of an office window to fall to the hard surface of the quadrangle on a freezing night- and Gil, one of the four main protagonists, comments, "I hope he's okay".

The paucity of the language used in the book really upset me considering the high-falutin' tone.

Very well, it has ciphers, Renaissance mysteries, undergraduates, murders, theses, characters. All good ingredients for a book- but these ingredients don't cook up to a good repast, more of a stodgy pudding that requires a good lie-down afterwards to recover from the indigestion.