Dan Brown Is Still Chasing the Da Vinci Code Thrill. Only Now, Everything Else Has Changed.

"Brown's latest attempt, The Secret of Secrets, follows the pattern of his previous novels featuring Robert Langdon, the hero of The Da Vinci Code and four other thrillers that have followed the Harvard professor of religious symbology (a nonexistent academic discipline, as many, many critics have pointed out) as he races across the world, decoding secret messages embedded in Renaissance artworks alluding to world-changing secrets that have been covered up for centuries."

"'It really makes you think,' a man told me 22 years ago at a barbecue, explaining that he'd just read The Da Vinci Code. At the time, I scoffed. Brown's novel takes as its premise a conspiracy theory most fully outlined in another bestseller, 1982's Holy Blood, Holy Grail, by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln, a work of pseudohistory claiming to prove that Jesus fathered a child by Mary Magdalene, whose descendants became the Merovingian dynasty in what is now France."

Dan Brown achieved massive sales but struggles to top his 2003 breakthrough, The Da Vinci Code. The Secret of Secrets returns to the Robert Langdon formula: the Harvard professor of religious symbology races across the globe decoding secret messages hidden in Renaissance artworks that point to allegedly world-changing concealed truths. With ancient mysteries depleted, Brown combines archaic conspiracies with futuristic elements. The Da Vinci Code premise derives from Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which claims Jesus fathered a child by Mary Magdalene and that a Priory of Sion protected Merovingian descendants. The Priory proved to be a modern forgery whose documents were planted in France's national library.

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