(Warning: Might contain spoilers)
On May 14th one of the most eagerly awaited books this year FINALLY hit the shelves, and subsequently was lifted straight back off by acceptably excited buyers. Dan Brown’s newest instalment to his Robert Langdon series, Inferno, has set pulses racing across the globe, as people impatiently wait to see what thrilling artistic entanglement the Harvard professor has gotten himself in to this time.
The book is 4th in the series of the unlucky symbologist, who finds himself in the midst of earth shattering cover-ups and races against time on an altogether too regular basis. So let’s see what deathly journeys Langdon has been through to make it to Inferno, beginning with:
Angels and Demons: It was his wide spread reputation as a famous symbologist that encouraged a Vatican police man to show up unannounced one morning to ask for Langdon’s help. An ambigram spelling out Illuminati, the symbol and the group thought to be long lost, was sent to the Pope’s office, threatening the livelihood of religion as we know it. Altough totally out of his depth, it is up to Langdon to find out the meaning behind the threat, and a solution to the problem.
On the other side of the world, a CERN physicist is found murdered and a canister of classified and exponentially dangerous antimatter has gone missing.
The two events are dangerously connected, which leads to a race against time, through the deepest caverns of religious history, to save the city of God from being blown to oblivion.
The Da Vinci Code: After Jacques Sauniére is found dead in the Louvre, his body positioned as the Vitruvian Man, Robert Langdon is called in to decipher the reasoning behind the old man’s last few acts. Unbeknown to the Harvard professor, he has been tricked into coming and is the number one suspect after Sauniére left a final note: “P.S find Robert Langdon”. Knowing of his innocence, police cryptographer and granddaughter of Sauniére Sophie Neveu, manages to help Langdon escape from the clutches of the French police.
This leads to an epic journey to find out why Sauniére was murdered, what secrets the old man had been hiding to inherit his death, and why a seemingly uninvolved Harvard professor became the driving force of the entire investigation.
The Lost Symbol: After receiving an invitation to give a lecture at the United States Capitol, Langdon arrives only to find out that the invitation was sent by a lunatic freemason who has kidnapped his friend. The kidnapping is used as leverage for Langdon to take part in yet another mission which he will be lucky to come out of alive.
Langdon’s mission: To find the long lost masonic pyramids and the “Lost Word”, hidden underneath Washington DC.
With a psychopath threatening to kill his friend and the Washington police force coming after him (because he is of course suspect in his friends kidnapping), Langdon’s only option is to comb through the Freemasons darkest secrets and find these missing objects before it’s too late.
This tremendous trilogy of novels is nothing short of genius, with mind blowing twists that will only make you yearn for more. Three definite must reads.