Rather than using the last minutes of his life to scrawl, “The is in the ” on a crumpled napkin, he uses them to concoct an artsy, esoteric scavenger hunt through a foreign city. Which brings me to the surest way readers can tell whether they have landed in a Dan Brown novel: A character is dying - a wizened character who is the sole possessor of a crucial piece of knowledge. His novels are like high-stakes, 500-page Mad Libs a reader doesn’t have to worry that it will be a fun ride, just that the adverbs and proper nouns will line up in a way that honors the art form. He has perfected the breathless art of the cliffhanger chapter, the ooky villain, the histor ish backdrop. At this point, it’s already clear what Brown can do with the genre. One is still excited - one must be Doubleday is printing a whopping 4 million copies - but the anticipation feels different. Tuesday marks the release of “ Inferno,” Brown’s newest Langdon installment. “The Lost Symbol” seemed of the moment and of particularly heightened American interest, set as it was in D.C. It’s been four years now since our last encounter with Robert Langdon, the be-tweeded hero who has Da Vinci’d and Demon-ed his way through three previous Dan Brown page-rippers.īrown’s last book, “ The Lost Symbol,” came out in 2009, smack in the vortex of a Brownado - a whirling era of “Da Vinci Code” European tour packages and Tom Hanks’s second cinematic turn as the lank-haired Harvard symbologist.
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