Mes Secrets Inconnus

I finished Angels And Demons by Dan Brown the other night.  This book rocks as a recreational read!  This is by the same author as The DaVinci Code, and it looks like it was a previous work that was re-released after the success of Code.

Symbologist Robert Langdon gets an early morning call from a person in Switzerland claiming to have a dead body with an Illuminati brand on his chest.  The caller turns out to be the head of CERN, and he's concerned about the Illuminati cult that everyone thought was dead.  Langdon ends up in Switzerland to lend his expertise in the symbol, and from there is rushed to the Vatican when a massive explosive anti-matter device is stolen from CERN and is set to blow up the ancient seat of the Catholic church.  A dead pope, kidnapped cardinals turning up branded and dead, an ancient secret society that everyone thought was extinct, and a countdown to finding and stopping the explosion.  On top of that, the plot starts twisting at breakneck speed in the last 100 pages. 

This is a book I could have easily plowed straight through and been perfectly happy in doing so.  The pace of the story never slowed down, and the turns at the end weren't quite what I expected them to be.  I wasn't highly thrilled with The DaVinci Code, as it went off in some theological directions I didn't care much for.  And I also felt it was the author espousing his beliefs in novel form and pounding the reader over the head about them repeatedly.  This book is more a crime/conspiracy novel set in the Vatican, but not so heavy on alternative theology.

Definitely one of the better recreational reads of late...