Dan Brown's Lost Symbol

As I sat down and opened the book, a large black cat jumped onto my lap. While that cat does live here, another black cat promptly appeared on page 26, making its rounds in the Capitol basement. What happens to the cat we never do learn, though we proceed for the next five hundred pages on a fully guided educational tour of subterranean Washington. It brings a whole new level of meaning to the labyrinthine corridors of power in the nation's capital.

What the Da Vinci Code was to the Knights Templars, Lost Symbol is to American Freemasonry which may wish to condemn this book or refuse to comment and just hope it will go away. The better comparison, though, is to Margaret Truman's whodunits like Murder in the National Cathedral. If you know D.C., if you love D.C., you will be able to follow this story monument by monument through the Federal Triangle and out to the edge of the Beltway. The characters are caricatures; the plot has them running madly from point A to point B to point C as they decipher clues against the clock of inevitable doom should they fail.

This is the secret: Jehovah is the Holy One and that truth lies within the Order, praise God.

This is the mystery: How Dan Brown managed to write a truly nonpartisan book about Washington, which he has quite successfully done. There are plenty of people with agendas here but neither Republicans nor Democrats are in control. The White House makes a cameo appearance only as a reference point for another location four blocks away where true power resides.

No great literary merit here but it's a decent piece of escape fiction -- if you know the city.