The Da Vinci Code 1st (first) Edition by Brown, Dan published by Doubleday (2003)

By: Dan Brown

The DaVinci Code follows symbologist Robert Langdon and cryptologist Sophie Neveu after a murder in the Louvre Museum in Paris, when they become involved in a battle between the Priory of Sion and Opus Dei over the possibility of Jesus having been married to Mary Magdalene. The title of the novel refers, among other things, to the finding of the first murder victim in the Grand Gallery of the Louvre, naked and posed like Leonardo da Vinci's famous drawing, the Vitruvian Man, with a cryptic message written beside his body and a pentagram drawn on his chest in his own blood. The novel explores an alternative religious history, whose central plot point is that the Merovingian kings of France were descended from the bloodline of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, ideas derived from Clive Prince's The Templar Revelation (1997) and books by Margaret Starbird. The book also refers to The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982) though Dan Brown has stated that it was not used as research material.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: B00E31ELGG
• Release Date: January 2003
• Publisher: Doubleday
• Length: 454 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 6.1" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Cultural literacy thriller.

This book starts with lots of superfluous description of people and places that never ties up or are relevant to the tale. The story takes quite a bit of time to get off the ground. The storyline is textbook predictable. You know who the bad guy(s) are before they are introduced. As they say in the trade, "it is the last person you would suspect." Now for the positives. After a slow start, the action finally starts to move. If you think it has holes that you could fly a jet through, maybe, but if it did not, you would have no story. One thing people enjoy in books is things they already know about. With Tony Hillerman, it is Navajo culture. With Stephen King, it is spookiness based on standard premises. This book also bases its suspense on existing conspiracies, weaving current events into age-old mysteries.