I remember reading Dan Brown’s book for the first time. It was The Da Vinci Code and was I sucked into the world shown by him! The storytelling was just amazing. There may have been flaws, but twenty years ago, I found myself completely engrossed in the book. After that, I read all his novels.

Now, in 2025, his new book, The Secret of Secrets has come out, that too after a gap of almost eight years from his last novel. So, of course I was keen to read this one.

The Secret of Secrets starts with Robert Langdon visiting Prague with his partner, Katherine Solomon. Katherine is a noetic scientist who has been invited to Prague to give a guest lecture. Their morning starts with Robert Langdon leaving the hotel for his routine swim. But when he comes back to the hotel, events unfold and he finds himself entangled in a police investigation.

Also, Katherine goes missing and Langdon finds the dead body of Dr. Brigita Gessner in her lab with whom Katherine was supposed to have breakfast that morning.

At the same time, in New York, manuscript and research material of Katherine’s new book are deleted from the Penguin Random House secure server with no way to track the hackers or recover the yet unpublished book.

As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that someone wants to stop Katherine from publishing her book and there is also another person trying to stop whatever experiments were being performed in Dr Gessner’s lab.

In true Dan Brown style, the mystery is woven with the history and architecture of Prague. The story is full of plot twists and surprises which keeps the mystery alive till the very end.

“Fear makes us selfish,” Katherine said. “The more we fear death, the more we cling to ourselves, our belongings, our safe spaces…to that which is familiar. We exhibit increased nationalism, racism, and religious intolerance. We flout authority, ignore social mores, steal from others to provide for ourselves, and become more materialistic. We even abandon our feelings of environmental responsibility because we sense the planet is a lost cause and we’re all doomed anyway.”

First the positives: the city of Prague has been explained in all it’s glory in true Dan Brown style. As we run through the city with Langdon, we can feel the place in the pages of this book. The suspense of who the murderer is and their reason for killing is maintained till the end. 

There is also CIA whose involvement is intriguing and they are ruthless in getting what they want. Robert Langdon finally has a romantic partner!

The problem with the book is that a lot of pages are dedicated to explaining consciousness and out-of-body experiences. As the book revolves around Katherine Solomon and her unpublished book about human consciousness, some explanation of this phenomena was important but not as much as is written. I personally found it to be slowing the pace of the book because it felt that the author was meandering from the main story.

Picture this, the protagonists are running for their lives, they don’t know who to trust or where to hide and then, they start discussing subconscious mind which goes on and on. This broke the flow of my reading multiple times.

The story, the setting, the suspense, they are all such that if done properly would have made this another brilliant book from Dan Brown but the extensive lecture-kind conversations make reading this book a little bit tedious.

My rating: 3.5/5