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Dan Brown clearly had fun writing his new book. It’s contagious.
Robert Langdon is back in “The Secret of Secrets.” Prepare for 600 hilariously hectic pages of murder, mayhem and New Age murmuring.
September 9, 2025, 6 min, Review by Ron Charles
In 2003, if you made the mistake of confessing — say, at a barbecue — that you reviewed books for a living, the other men on the patio would look at you piteously until one of them thought to ask, “What did you think of ‘The Da Vinci Code’?”
More than two decades on, the magnitude of Dan Brown’s success is still hard to quantify without using exponential math or to justify without succumbing to despair. He has enough copies in print for every adult in the United States to own one, which you can confirm by checking the coffee table in any Airbnb.
Like so many things that are insanely popular — Crocs, Nutella, MrBeast — Brown’s thrillers look easy to imitate but aren’t. He shatters dramatic moments into shiny, irresistible shards.He lures us in with a layer of intellectuality as deep as the honey glaze on an Easter ham. And in book after book, we’re rushed through perilous crises involving esoteric knowledge that somehow threatens the entire world. With Brown, everything everywhere all at once is at stake — the church, social order, Western civilization — which makes your clogged gutters feel momentarily less urgent.
The last time we saw Brown’s fit, nerdy hero — Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon — was eight years ago in a mind-bogglingly silly book called “Origin.” In that story, Langdon dashes around Spain trying to track down a dead billionaire’s PowerPoint presentation that “boldly contradicted almost every established religious doctrine.”
Brown’s latest thriller, “The Secret of Secrets,” tweaks that reliable formula only slightly, but through some occult alchemy, his New Coke is better than the old brew.
Image source: Doubleday
Reader, I drank it.
📚
Following Books
This time around, we’re in Prague. Brown surveys its Gothic beauty, medieval history and Kafkaesque mystique like Rick Steves on a 24-hour layover. Langdon has come to the City of a Hundred Spires to cheer on his older but stunningly beautiful new girlfriend, Dr. Katherine Solomon, last seen in “The Lost Symbol” (2009).The night before the novel opens, Katherine delivered a mesmerizing lecture about her work in noetics, the science of human consciousness.
Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.
Continue/Read Original Article Here: ‘The Secret of Secrets’ by Dan Brown – The Washington Post
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