By David M. Chandler

There are perhaps a dozen or so people on the planet who haven't yet read Dan Brown's international mega-blockbuster, "The Da Vinci Code." These blissfully ignorant folks are unaware that it starts with the murder of the curator of the Louvre Museum in Paris, who is also the Grandmaster of the Priory of Sion, an ages-old secret society that ... hold on, I'm getting ahead of my self.

A visiting professor, Robert Langdon, is called in to give his opinion of the murder scene, which is chock-a-block with esoteric clues. Unbeknownst to Langdon, he's also the prime suspect. Before the gendarmes can clap the cuffs on him, he's rescued by the curator's granddaughter (and police cryptographer), Sophie, though not before they manage to decode the clues her dying grandpere' left all over the place. Thus begins the chase that makes up the rest of the novel.

Our heroes are pursued by not only the Paris cops, but also by an agent of the sinister (and real) Catholic lay movement Opus Dei who are after the secret of the Holy Grail which the Priory guarded. The grail is not the cup used at the Last Supper but rather the "secret" of Christ's bloodline (as detailed in "Holy Blood, Holy Grail," from which Brown cribs shamelessly) which has survived through Mary Magdalene, the Merovingian dynasty of France and a couple of subsequent French families.

To anyone with the least awareness of modern occult thought or conspiracy theory, all this is hopelessly old news. Brown spins out his take on these well-chewed ideas with a few embellishments of his own over the course of the next several chapters. The first thing that will strike the discriminating reader about this novel is that it is almost unbelievably poorly written. I mean, if Brown had written this as a Doc Savage adventure, the editors would have sent it back for a rewrite. He always "tells" and never "shows." His prosody is of the unimaginative, ham-fisted sort favored in bad young adult fiction, and his characters have rather less depth and complexity than the average "South Park" school boy. You can spot his plot complications coming blocks away. If the book looks long in the hardcover format, it's because it's in very large print and has numerous very short chapters (3-5 pages).

As for the puzzles, which are (apparently) the main attraction for most readers, any half-bright fourth-grader should be able to figure them out inside of 90 seconds. The solutions always point to yet another puzzle that Langdon and Sophie have to race to beat the baddies to, eventually leading to a conclusion that will leave you wondering why they all bothered in the first place. To be fair, Brown has crafted a reasonably fast-paced potboiler with a superficially intriguing premise and a compelling "grabs you by the seat of the pants and never lets go" story line. He may not be much as a scholar or as an author of great literature, but he can certainly rattle out a page turner.

The phenomenal sales of the book have spawned a whole mini-industry of critique and "codeology," ranging from scholarly appraisals of the historical questions raised to rabid denunciations of "Lies! All Lies!" from all over the Christian spectrum. Heck, if it gets a few people looking at the less obvious aspects of history and religion, it may even wind up being worth the trees it took to print it.