The avenging angel who tracks them is not Silas, the self-flagellating albino monk, but a self-gelding bodybuilder who nicknames himself Moloch, after one of the devils in Paradise Lost. SauniГЁre, the murdered Louvre curator, becomes Peter Solomon, the kidnapped and mutilated CEO of the Smithsonian Institution SauniГЁre's granddaughter is matched by Solomon's sister, recruited as Langdon's sidekick.

New names are assigned to players familiar from The Da Vinci Code. Langdon, having saved the Vatican from a nuclear blast in Angels & Demons, now comes home to give another dreary academic lecture, after which he sprints off to preserve the US government from a revelation that could destabilise the world. What he promises consumers is more of the same, and in The Lost Symbol he has stirred up again his formulaic blend of motorised chase and mystical mumbo-jumbo. His new novel might scavenge for remnants of what he calls 'the Ancient Mysteries', but the mystery that really excites him is a modern one, a trade secret known to only two members of a corporate brotherhood at the Coca-Cola headquarters: the magic spell that turns water not into wine, which is all Christ could manage, but into bubbles and money.Д«rown, like Coke, is a global brand.

Forget about Brown's hints of a closely guarded wisdom that can lead us hierarchically from earth to heaven, like base metals transmuted into gold. His novels speculate about the suppressed details of Christ's sex life and the location of the Holy Grail, the hermetic experiments of alchemy and the etymological riddles of biblical scholarship вЂ“ oh, and I shouldn't forget the most highly prized secret of all: the formula for whatever mixture of syrups, caffeine and sodium benzoate makes up Coca-Cola.ДЄt the beginning of The Lost Symbol, Brown's 'symbologist' Robert Langdon, about to start a frantic quest for the priestly lore hidden beneath the monuments of Washington DC, likens 'the recipe for classic Coke' to the occult rites of the Freemasons.

What is the lost symbol about