Dan Brown Wants to Tell You A Secret
Robert Langdon is back!!!!!!
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Stop the presses, sound the alarm, blow that white Pope smoke up the Vatican’s chimney: Dan Brown has written another Robert Langdon novel. Billed by Brown himself as “the most intricately plotted and ambitious novel [he’s] written to date,” The Secret of Secrets is due out September 9, 2025. The synopsis provided on Brown’s website promises “a propulsive, twisty, thought-provoking masterpiece” that takes Langdon to Prague where his new girlfriend, Katherine Solomon, will be delivering a “groundbreaking lecture” related to her new book on “noetic science” that contains “startling discoveries about the nature of human consciousness and threatens to disrupt centuries of established belief.”
I honestly don’t know how you can read that paragraph and not be immediately charmed by the prospect of consuming this nonsense, but if you’re are not a freak who spends most of her free time thinking about Dan Brown’s unholy narratives, you might be wondering things like: “Wait, what was the last Robert Langdon book?” “Who is Robert Langdon’s girlfriend?” “Does this make any sense, like at all?” Fantastic questions.
This is the first new story in the saga of the Harvard professor/renowned symbologist/Jack Ryan for cucks since 2017’s Origin. (Unless you count Peacock’s Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, which was an adaptation of Brown’s third Langdon book and tragically cancelled after one season.) In that book, Langdon traveled to Spain where he solved a mystery related to the literal origins of the universe. Where will he go from there? The title promises an even bigger secret so buckle up!
While the Langdon adventures thus far have been pretty self-contained, with only little winky references in later books to getting in trouble with the Vatican (in the first book/second movie Angels & Demons) or a little dust-up in Paris (in the second book/first movie The DaVinci Code.) But the return of Katherine Solomon suggests that The Secret of Secrets is breaking from that tradition. Katherine was Langdon’s requisite lithe love interest in The Lost Symbol (the third book/first TV series), as the sister of Robert’s mentor. (She was aged down to his daughter in Peacock’s Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, since Langdon on that show is Hot and Young.)
As to whether it makes sense? No, not at all — and that’s the whole appeal. The Robert Langdon books are for turning your brain off while lighting it up at the same time. It’s National Treasure for grown-ups. It’s an escape room for your brain: just convoluted enough that you come out of it feeling like a smartypants, but actually extremely linear and simple so that it doesn’t ruin your vacation. My esteemed coworkers in Vulture’s book Slack, in fact, suggested that copies of The Secret of Secrets should come pre-wrinkled and dog-eared, with salt stains and sand in the pages. That’s the kind of big-brain lateral thinking that would make Robert Langdon proud.
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