The curator of the Louvre is murdered in his museum and leaves a cryptic message that appears to point to Robert Langdon, a symbologist from Harvard, as the culprit. The police question Langdon pretending to need his expertise but really hoping to catch him in a lie. In jumps Sophie Neveu, a police code breaker who warns Langdon of his danger and forces him into an escape from the museum. Turns out, Sophie is the murdered curators granddaughter. She knows Langdon is innocent and needs his help to crack the messages left to her by her grandfather. What follows is a bizarre romp through Paris and England as the unlikely pair elude the police, a vicious albino monk, and the true puppet-master who orchestrated it all.  
 
The Da Vinci Code is a classic thriller with an intellectual bent. Fact and fiction are woven into such a tight pattern of conspiracy that it becomes difficult to see where one ends and the other begins. It had me running to my art books with some astonishment, and the history generally rang true.  
 
The first chapter is immediately engrossing and hooks the reader from the very first sentence. The rest of the story fails somewhat to live up to the potential offered in that first chapter. The plot follows a rather traditional pattern in the modern thriller, and though it has been done again and again (if you are around writers for any length of time you will discover that there are no original plots), the perspective offered in the tale is fresh enough to be thoroughly enjoyable. There are good reasons this novel is on the bestseller list.  
 
There are a few things that detracted from this story. The first was Browns over-reliance on two constructs of the fiction writer. When he needed to get across a lot of background information (and there is an enormous amount of it), he did one of two things. He either had Langdon flashback to a lecture he gave in a class somewhere (yawn) or he had two or more characters discuss the issue to death. Fiction writers often refer to this as maid and butler talk because its like the maid and the butler discussing the goings on of the family when they both know the goings on. It is about as thrilling as watching paint dry. The other thing that was a disappointment was when the author withheld information from the reader. I presume this was to create tension; all it managed to do was create aggravation. For instance, why keep the secret ritual in the basement that had Sophie so upset from the reader? He kept that from us until near the end.  
 
The characters also needed some help. With the exception of the albino monk and the police chief, the characters were too good for their own good, and failed to react in a believable manner to the situation. No one had a nervous breakdown, no tempers flared. If it was me being interrogated by the police and someone barged in, took the bug the police planted in my jacket and tossed it into a moving truck thereby making it look like I was running, a fugitive, and therefore guilty, I think I might be just a little peeved.  
 
However, the layout of the story, the imminent danger they kept finding themselves in, and the amusing aspect of the puzzles carried the book. I am looking forward to more from Dan Brown.  
 
Enjoy.  
