A survivor of the Nisei internment camps of World War II, she is pure chain-smoking, command-snapping venom. But he does create a memorable one in the diminutive person of Inoue Sato, head of the CIA’s Office of Security. At times, the book reads like an episode of the TV series '24.'īuilding psychologically complex characters is not Brown’s strong suit, nor need it be since he’s essentially writing genre fiction. All the action proceeds from these entanglements. Alas, the CIA is also onto Mal’akh and is determined to keep Langdon from messing things up. To prevent this, Langdon has to rescue a friend who Mal’akh has kidnapped and is torturing for information. Having insinuated himself into the highest rank of Masons, his mission is to discover and expose the organization’s deepest and most socially disruptive secrets. He is truly a terrifying foe, rich, muscular, merciless and tattooed from head to toe.

When he’s not assuming other identities, the villain Langdon faces calls himself Mal’akh. The action takes place in and around some of Washington, D.C.’s grandest architectural treasures, among them the Capitol, the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress. And again Langdon is accompanied in his frantic flights from danger by a woman who’s both attractive and academically worthy of him. Once again Brown’s protagonist, the Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, must unlock a series of fiendishly cryptic puzzles to keep world chaos at bay, all the while confronting, within the span of a single day, a self-mutilating but endlessly resourceful villain, a powerful secret society (the Freemasons) and a well-meaning but obstructionist law-enforcement agency (the CIA). Given the volcanic sales of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, it’s understandable that he’s chosen to retread many of that book’s conventions and plot devices for The Lost Symbol.

The lost symbol by dan brown