A brilliant work of fiction. Review on The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

I will not go into the plot as it has already been covered well enough. This book,The Da Vinci Code if read as a work of fiction is excellent. It has almost everything one may wish. Mystery, murder, secret religious societies, chemistry between the protagonists, adventure and what not.

The novel provides information about 'Opus Dei' and 'Priory of Sion', two religious societies. To the credit of Author, information about at least 'Opus Dei' seems to be unbiased. The way they informed police in the end about presence of Sallas in their headquarters is convincing.

As I am not much familiar with christian history, it was easy for me not to ponder on whether I agree with arguments given and just continue reading it as a novel. When the novel discusses 'The Last Supper' painting, I gave in to temptation and used internet to find the painting, analyzing it to find that what Dan Brown claims to be true, and even went to some web sites discussing his claims. The riddles presented in Novel are quite good, though there's no way the reader might solve most of them on their own.

The story is fast paced, and always small mysteries keep popping up and getting solved. So the reader always remains hooked to the plot.

Also, the website supporting the book and the web hunt for clues is marvellous.

Inspite of all these positive attributes, the climax is predictable and a let down. Something in me knew who is going to be the villain, and voila, that's who it is. But it's hard to believe that it was that one person who was behind all this and managed to fool everyone.

Also, even though the writer explains how the offices of members of upper echleon were bugged, he does not tell us how did the villain identified them. Were they so careless that they called each others from their offices?

For every claim made by the author about history of Christianity, I found many counterclaims and after researching things for few hours, I gave up. So I find it hard to take claims made by the author seriously.

I will just recommend this book to be read as a work of fiction. And yes, I had to finish the book in a single day. Simply could not resist it.