** spoiler alert ** 
 After reading `Da Vinci Code' & waiting years to get my hands on the next Robert Langdon book, I just can't help but feel incredibly under whelmed by this book. Dan Brown has had enough time to where this should have been a better book than what it turned out to be, but somehow this book ended up being just a big disappointment to me. 
 The book follows up with Robert Langdon after his escapades in the previous book. (No, you don't learn anything about what happened to Sophie, although we do learn that Langdon has put out a book about the symbolism from his previous adventure.) Langdon has been invited to Washington D.C. to speak as a last minute guest of influential Peter Solomon. Once there, he gets embroiled in a mystery of very high stakes as he must discover secrets that masons have tried to keep hidden for hundreds of years- and try to keep them from a menacing threat who calls himself Mal'akh. 
 Really & truthfully, there weren't as many surprises or big gasping revelations in the story. You can see many of the big "surprises" a mile away (I guessed Mal'akh's identity very early on in the novel) & the riddles just aren't as great as the ones in his previous two books. I can't quite place my finger on why the mysteries & riddles aren't as interesting as in the previous books by him- it's not like the mysteries of the masons don't intrigue me. 
 As far as character development goes, I really didn't see a lot of it. We're given a bit of background on each character, but only one or two people are really fleshed out. One of the more promising characters (CIA operative Inoue Sato) has some of the worst character development in that it just isn't done. She throws her weight around but shows no real depth to her character, which is a big shame because it could have been far better executed. Other characters in the book appear & are mentioned a few times but serve as cannon fodder for the villain. There's also the female sidekick of Katherine Solomon (sister of Peter) whose main purpose is to serve as a sounding board for all of Langdon's theorizing & such. (Thankfully she's not a romantic interest- there's NO chemistry between these characters.) 
 After the big showdown with the villain there's about 40 pages of Langdon & Katherine getting most of the mysteries revealed, which after a while got a little dull. I couldn't help but hear the "wrap it up" music from the Oscars playing in my head at one point- I just wanted Brown to get to the point & do a cleaner ending to the book. 
 This isn't to say that I didn't get some enjoyment out of this book. It was good for whiling away a few hours, but as a much anticipated follow up it fell drastically short. (I wasn't even really expecting that much out of this book either...) I'm torn between giving this book three stars or giving it two stars- I've read far better from his contemporaries in the field (not to mention better from the author himself), but I'm going to have to face the truth- this book just wasn't that great. So yeah... 2.5 stars (but I'm giving it a 2).