A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Go!Īre we not men? We are-well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).Ī zombie apocalypse is one thing. Romance, religion, science, murder, mysticism, architecture, action. And how come the powerful head of the Illuminati knows all the Vatican's secrets, and can enter and leave at will? But they'll be going up against a wily and potent Illuminati assassin, causing plenty of thrilling cat-and-mouse maneuvers and life-or-death cliffhangers.

Langdon and Vetra's scientist daughter, Vittoria, must convince the late pope's chamberlain, now in charge of the Vatican until the new pope is elected, to help them unravel the mysteries of the Illuminati and, perhaps, save the cardinals from gruesome deaths. As bad, someone's kidnapped the four top cardinals, and a message from the Illuminati states that one cardinal will be killed-with lots of Illuminati symbolism-every hour until the antimatter explodes. When the canister's batteries go dead-boom. The canister of antimatter soon turns up-in Rome, hidden somewhere in Vatican City, just as the church's cardinals are gathering to select a new pope. Langdon's an expert on the history of the Illuminati, a medieval pro-science, anti-Catholic power group, often suspected of infiltrating mighty institutions but now considered extinct. Physicist Leonardo Vetra has been murdered, and a quantity of dreadfully dangerous antimatter stolen worse, Vetra was branded with a single word: Illuminati.

Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon gets a call from Maximilian Kohler, director of CERN's Geneva particle-physics research complex. Another near-future technothriller from the author of Digital Fortress (1998).

Angels & Demons by Dan Brown