While on an academic speaking engagement in France, Robert Langdon is called in by French authorities when a noted museum curator is murdered in the night and has only left coded ciphers behind as clues. With the help of Sophie Neveau, a French cryptologist, Langdon sets to deciphering what the murdered man was trying to tell them before he died. Each decoded message is another clue in the startling mystery that surrounds the curator and his involvement with an age-old secret society whose main purpose was to protect the Holy Grail.

Although Dan Brown breaks many of the more traditional rules of novel writing (repetitive use of flashbacks that break up the story’s plot line, stereotypical character traits, extremely short chapters, and a huge amount of historical and academic information) - the novel is a delight to read. The short chapters kept the pace of the novel at light speed, so that not even repetitive flashbacks can slow it down. The use of stereotypical character traits make it easier to understand or relate to several of the characters without needing to go into endless detail about their pasts - but Brown has more than one trick up his sleeve and I warn the reader to never feel too secure about how one of his endings will turn out, he just might surprise you.

Incorporating massive amounts of historical and academic information is no easy task, but Brown does it in such a seamless fashion that it is almost invisible within the story’s natural narrative. I simply feel smarter for having read his novel! The intelligence associations that Brown makes within his novel are definitely the mark of a master craftsman… and I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a good book even if you’ve never been drawn to suspense novels in the past.

--Nadia Cornier