I would say Silentium starts out kind of slow. It's done throughout from the point of view of the Judicials who are taking down everything and requesting depositions from the main characters. Through most of the book, I was thinking that this seemed like reading the author's collection of notes before he actually put it all into a story, but the last few chapters really began to get exciting and feel like a traditional story, rather than just a collection of documents organized chronologically.