The Lost Symbol

I just read The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown, author of Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code. I must say I was disappointed.

It’s redundant and he gets repetitious at certain points. As in the previous novels, all the action takes place in one night. It also seems that Brown used his imagination very well and was more verbose than necessary.

This time, symbologist Langdon is called in to Washington to give a last minute lecture but winds up involved in a mystery involving the Free Masons. The book randomly goes from the current time frame to the past and back again. It is easy to keep up with it all but it gets annoying when something is happening and then we’re whisked off 10 years earlier.

And the book reads like a movie script at times and a boring movie at that. There is CIA involvement since there is a potential leak and the CIA agent in charge is one of the two interesting characters. The other is the antagonist who knows a lot of Masonry, but the striking things about him are his height and his tattoos.

We are taken to some of Washington’s historical sights and when we get to the climax, it’s so anti-climactic which is when I realized I read this for this pay-off? I am a Dan Brown fan but I would not recommend this.

Of course everyone’s gonna read it expecting something spectacular like the above two novels. I just re-read The Da Vinci Code and loved it. Brown has written some other novels that I have yet to read but I hope they do not let me down like this one.