As a graphic designer, I had a special interest in Dan Brown's bestseller, what with all its references to art and symbols. But having read Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum and more recently Karen Armstrong's A History of God, I had a latent interest in Templar Knights, Freemasonry and Roman Catholicism. What a treat for me to read how Opus Dei was somehow involved in Dan Brown's novel, recalling many articles from Larry Henares, whose own personal crusade was to slam Opus Dei in his PDI column.

All told, this book kept a rivetting pace, and unlike some of the writeups I've read, I did like the ending. There were of course far stretches of the imagination, as with most works of fiction, but the joy is in negotiating what is fact and fiction. To a large extent, this is what is so appealing with this novel: There are high-level conspiracies, secret personas, gruesome murders, french snootiness and sex cults -- what more could you ask for?

The quick pace did not allow you much time to get involved in the characters, which was fine, because it was indeed about the story. There's a sense of Spooky Mulder and Scully here, where two seemingly complete strangers are chasing down the supernatural, with sleeplessness and sexual tension thrown in for good measure.

And I did get this feeling that I was reading Umberto Eco Lite, a kind of Pendulum meets Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, complete with the surprise identity revelation at the end. Some of the clues were a bit ridiculous, not to mention how stumped a Harvard historian and an Oxford Knight could get. C'mon, I picked out "SOFIA" and "APPLE" off the bat! At any rate, I didn't recognize the Fibonacci sequence, but then again I wasn't good at math.