Langdon and Vidal decide they must find the 47-character password that will unlock Kirsch’s discovery while trying to stay out the clutches of the shadowy killers trying to keep it secret.

But the billionaire is assassinated before he can reveal what he’s found.īefore you can say secret conspiracy, Langdon is racing around Spain in the company of the “spectacularly beautiful” Ambra Vidal, who also happens to be the museum director and the fiancée to the next king of Spain. In Brown’s telling, Kirsch’s answer threatens to render all religions into myths as obsolete as Zeus. The book kicks off with Langdon present at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, when tech billionaire Edmond Kirsch prepares to announce a scientific breakthrough that will answer man’s “universal mysteries”: Where do we come from and where are we going? It’s the fifth thriller to star Robert Langdon, the tweedy but dashing Harvard professor of “symbology and religious iconology,” who was played by Tom Hanks in the movie adaptations. Paul next week for a sold-out appearance as part of the Talking Volumes book series. That’s why Zeus has been a muse of sorts for Brown’s latest book, “Origin,” which brings him to St. “He sits on my desk for eight hours a day when I’m writing.”

When my suitcase comes out, he actually gets quite upset,” Brown said of Zeus. It’s true that the god that watches over Brown as he writes is actually a cat, a massive orange and white tabby that adopted Brown after it wandered over from the neighbor’s house near Portsmouth, N.H., five years ago and never left.īut ancient Egyptians once revered cats as demigods, and since then, cats like Zeus have never let Brown and the rest of us forget it. His latest page-turner, “Origin,” goes even further, playing with the idea that science could ultimately triumph over religion by essentially proving the nonexistence of God. His first blockbuster, “The Da Vinci Code,” was a puzzle-filled thriller that introduced readers to the notion that Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene were married with children. Which is a bit ironic, given that Brown vaulted to fame, success and bestseller lists by being a bit of an iconoclast, employing faith-shaking premises challenging ideas about religion and God as plot devices. Lately, Dan Brown has been writing his thriller novels under the forbidding eye of Zeus, the king of gods.

First name of the da vinci code author