"Brown's narrative moves rapidly, except for those clunky moments when people sound like encyclopedias....But no one reads Brown for style, right? The reason we read Dan Brown is to see what happens to Langdon: We want to know if he will overcome slim odds to uncover Mal'akh's motives and a cunning plan that, while not involving a vial of antimatter, is a major threat to national security....THE LOST SYMBOL is...like the experience on any roller coaster -- thrilling, entertaining and then it's over." "[P]ure, cheesy fun....Brown's plot is like a set of Russian nested dolls, with one revelation hiding another. He takes this mystical quest stuff quite seriously, and his unabashed enthusiasm for mystical topics such as pyramids, ancient wisdom, and Masonic initiation rites has an infectious quality that doubtless fuels his popularity....Perhaps the most notable quality of THE LOST SYMBOL is the breezy manner in which Brown's characters and his narrative examine truth, God, and other grand topics." "Too many popular authors have followed huge hits with terrible embarrassments. Mr. Brown hasn't done that. Instead, he's bringing sexy back to a genre that had been left for dead....Mr. Brown's splendid ability to concoct 64-square grids outweighs what might otherwise be authorial shortcomings. Within this book's hermetically sealed universe, characters' motivations don't really have to make sense; they just have to generate the nonstop momentum that makes THE LOST SYMBOL impossible to put down." "Writers envious of Brown's sales...have devoted much ink to his deficiencies as a stylist. These are still in place....So is Brown's habit of turning characters into docents. But so, too, is his knack for packing huge amounts of information (spurious or no) into an ever-accelerating narrative. Call it Brownian motion: a comet-tail ride of short paragraphs, short chapters, beautifully spaced reveals and, in the case of THE LOST SYMBOL, a socko unveiling of the killer's true identity." "As [a] District of Columbia resident, I must say that Mr. Brown does a first-rate job of delivering a Cook's tour with duly sinister overtones of Washington's famous sites....He also masterfully teases out the hidden Masonic threads in America's founding, evident in such disparate phenomena as the Masonic affiliations of at least half the Founding Fathers, including George Washington, and the design of the dollar bill, with its prominent pyramid on the back."