Robert Langdon is back. So, I lined up at the bookstore thinking it’s the same page-turning experience I had with The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons. After 30 or so pages, I can’t seem to turn the page anymore. I was wrong. Yeah, Robert Langdon is back… but he’s not back with a vengeance.

First, the plot starts with an invitation to Robert by one of his good friends and mentor, Peter Solomon, to be the main speaker of a huge engagement. The invitation was not done by Peter Solomon himself, just by an assistant, and “knowing” Robert’s history of demise, it would not be very typical of him to accept such an invitation if he wasn’t sure of what he’s getting into. But still, he accepted, went out of his way to just do this “speech” only to find out that Peter has been kidnapped and the person who’s keeping Peter is planning to do the same thing to him, unless he helps him unlock, of course, a code.

This is not your typical cat and mouse chase that we are used to with the first two Dan Brown novels. This book is more of a suspense-thriller-serial killer type of chase because the villian is gorier than the other villians in the two previous books, more so like the villian in Red Dragon. Mal’akh, the villian, is a tattooed, scary guy who is after an item that will bring him great power.