Deception Point, by Dan Brown Pocket Books, 576 pages
It is an election year in United States and President's opponent is Senator Sedgewick Sexton. Sen. Sexton has focussed his campaign on attacking NASA and has made a promise that if elected, he would open Space exploration to private corporations. Senator Sexton has a daughter, Rachel, who does not have a good relation with her father and also works as a gister for National Reconnaissance Office.
A NASA Satellite finds a meteor burried deep in the Arctic ice. The meteor contains fossilized samples of some bugs which are the first samples of extra-terrestrial life forms discovered on earth. This discovery has deep implications for NASA as well as the President, who has always backed NASA even though they were wasting taxpayers money in many unsuccessful missions.
To verify the authenticity of this discovery, the President sends a team of civilians to the Arctic. One of them in Rachel Sexton, the daughter of the President's opponent. Soon the civilian teams finds that the meteorite is one giant hoax. They also find that they are being targeted by Special Ops forces who want to just kill them.
This is the crux of the plot of this book. Like his other books, this one too is a page turner. Since I had read The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons, this book was very predictable. All these books have a similar plot structure, but with different locales and themes. The other two books were very clever in the way they combined religion with the plot. But this book for me was, yet another thriller.