Following Robert Langdon, a Journey Through Dan Brown’s Hidden Secrets

I love books featuring real-life locations. That’s why I write them. To read about a city steeped in history, to hear the pounding of a character’s steps and know that I can walk the same path! Finally, there’s less than a week to the release of Dan Brown’s new Robert Langdon mystery thriller, The Secret of Secrets. So I splurged into an imaginary journey of my own. Why don’t you join me?

Book Review: “The Secret of Secrets” by Dan Brown: a labyrinth of mind, mystery, and manuscripts. Read below.

A darkened cathedral, footsteps echoing, and there he is again, Robert Langdon, Harvard symbologist with his Mickey Mouse watch, stumbling into a mystery far older and more dangerous than most.

This is the world of Dan Brown. With every novel, Brown drops his tweed-jacketed professor into another deadly puzzle, one that entwines art, religion, and science with a ticking clock. At first glance the books feel similar, secret societies, shadowy villains, codes hidden in plain sight. But look closer and each novel has its own obsession, its own city pulling the strings behind the curtain for another Langdon adventure.

Angels & Demons (2000) – Rome in Flames

Science against faith, ancient orders against, ‘Illuminati’, modern ambition. A stolen canister of antimatter becomes a clock ticking beneath the Vatican.

Villain: The faceless hand manipulating chaos.
Major Locations:

• CERN in Geneva,
• Vatican City: St Peter’s Square
• church Santa Maria del Popolo on the north side of the Piazza del Popolo, Rome,
• church Santa Maria della Vittoria near Piazza della Repubblica,
• Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi in Piazza Navona, Rome,
• Castel Sant’Angelo, Rome
• (near) the tomb of Saint Peter, Saint Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City

Angel & Demons‘ Flavor: Dark espresso: bitter, strong, and burning the tongue yet leaving you wide awake. Rome is never gentle in this story; it scorches and dazzles at once.

The Da Vinci Code (2003) – Secrets in Stone and the Canvas of Paris

This was the book that made tourists swarm the Louvre, whispering in front of The Mona Lisa. History reframed as conspiracy, a secret bloodline hidden in art.

Villain: Silas, the tragic albino monk, fanatic yet oddly human.
Major Locations:

• The Louvre: Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings Mona Lisa and Madonna of the Rocks and his mural The Last Supper
• the tomb of Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey, London
• Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland,
• La Pyramide Inversée, Louvre, Paris

The Da Vinci Code Flavor: Red wine dark chocolate—smooth, elegant, with a lingering aftertaste of forbidden fruit. Seductive, intoxicating, slightly dangerous.

The Lost Symbol (2009) – America’s Secret Heart

For once, Langdon doesn’t cross oceans. The whole drama plays out in a single night within Washington, D.C., monuments, obelisks, domes and all.

Villain: Mal’akh, grotesque and brilliant, his body a living code.
Major Locations:

• the Capitol Rotunda room and subbasement at the US Capitol,
• Library of Congress,
• Washington Monument,
• National Cathedral
• Scottish Rite’s Masonic House of the Temple.

The Lost Symbol Flavor: Salted caramel—sweet on the surface, but sharp crystals crunch under the teeth, reminding you of danger beneath the gloss.

Inferno (2013) – Dante’s Shadow in Florence

If earlier books turned history into a maze, Inferno sets the world ablaze. A plague, a genius villain, and Langdon himself stripped of memory.

Villain: Bertrand Zobrist, a futurist whose logic is more terrifying than his cruelty.
Major Locations:

• Florence: Palazzo Vecchio, Vasari Corridor, Uffizi Gallery, the Baptistery, Boboli Gardens,
• Venice: Gran Canal, St. Mark’s Basilica, Doge’s Palace,
• Istanbul: Hagia Sophia, Basilica Cistern.

Inferno Flavor: Chili dark chocolate—smooth at first, then the fire creeps in, leaving you unsettled and sweating. A taste that refuses to let go.

Origin (2017) – Spain’s Future Tense

Here Brown steps boldly into the present: AI, science, and the age-old question of creation.

Villain: Not one man but shifting shadows—clergy, royalty, and technology itself.
Major Locations: Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Sagrada Família and Casa Milà in Barcelona, Montserrat Abbey.

Origin Flavor: Citrus chocolate—bright, zesty, sharp with modernity, cutting through tradition like a blade. Both refreshing and jarring, like Gaudí’s spires against the sky.

The Secret of Secrets (2025) – historical Prague, Czech Republic

Charles Bridge over Vltava River where Robert Langdon’s ordeal begins
Klementinum Library with its secret passage
the Old Town, dating back to Medieval times, winding streets and cocktail bars
The Four Seasons Hotel overlooking a frozen river in the book but with monogrammed slippers…
CODA Restaurant with its rooftop terrace

Book Review: “The Secret of Secrets” by Dan Brown – A Labyrinth of Mind, Mystery, and Manuscripts

Dan Brown returns with The Secret of Secrets, and with him returns Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, whose knack for stumbling into apocalyptic conspiracies remains as sharp as ever. This time, the action whirls through the mist-shrouded streets of Prague — a city steeped in mysticism and Renaissance science, where Emperor Rudolf II once summoned alchemists and Kabbalists to probe the limits of existence. It’s a fitting backdrop for a novel obsessed with consciousness, mortality, and the tantalizing possibility that the human mind is more than a sealed chamber of neurons.

Alongside Langdon is Katherine Solomon whom we first met in The Lost Symbol. But in The Secret of Secrets she is Langdon’s love interest and intellectual equal. Katherine’s life’s work, a manuscript that challenges the very foundations of neuroscience, is about to be published. Her radical thesis: that our brains are not isolated engines of thought, but portals into a shared, universal consciousness. Drawing on research into inhibitory neurotransmitters like GABA, and weaving in accounts of near-death experiences and parapsychological phenomena, Katherine argues that the mind may open onto realities beyond our own (and accessible when we sleep, for example, or when we experience that struck of  genius) . But such ideas, naturally, make her book dangerous.

Langdon, in Prague to support Katherine’s high-profile lecture, is swiftly drawn into a tangle of intrigue. Rival scientists, government operatives, and a criminal mastermind all converge with one shared goal: to suppress or exploit Katherine’s discovery. A hulking figure known only as the Golem, both pitiable and terrifying, stalks the city’s shadows anchoring Brown’s tale to Prague’s legendary past and his usual bestiary of monsters. Even as the narrative darts between brutal confrontations and coded messages, the ghost of history is ever-present, lurking along the cobblestones and cathedrals.

Brown has always relished mixing fact with fiction, and here he ladles on details about everything from Gustave Eiffel’s influence on Prague’s skyline to the frontiers of brain-machine interfaces pioneered by companies like Neuralink. Not all of these digressions feel necessary and Langdon’s habit of turning moments of mortal peril into lecture opportunities remains intact, The Secret of Secrets  occasionally tripping over its own exposition. There are also tonal missteps: the romance between Langdon and Katherine feels forced, awkward written, and certain scenes (including a pair of assassins trapped in a publisher building’s revolving doors) veer into the unintentionally comic.

Still, despite its flaws (repetitions, editorial laxness, moments of corporate in-joking (yes, Penguin Random House, the book’s actual publisher, appears in its pages), The Secret of Secrets clings to something refreshingly earnest. It is, at its core, a novel about the power of ideas and the dangerous beauty of books themselves.

And here’s where Dan Brown pulls off something unexpected: he makes us to yearn. To hark back for a time when one book alone would light up public debate, nudge the course of history, and get everyone talking. I certainly dreamed, researched, and even wrote about something like that in When Secrets Bloom (yes, I cannot stop talking about it). Even The Da Vinci Code, once a cultural earthquake, feels almost gentle now compared to a world ruled by podcasts and algorithm-driven feeds. In an age when reading is too often written off as outdated, The Secret of Secrets reminds us ( maybe a bit too loud and taking its time, but with real heart) that books still matter.

It’s easy to roll your eyes at Brown’s excesses. It’s easier to criticize (anything) that to do. To write. And harder to deny the propulsive pull of his storytelling. The Secret of Secrets may not rewrite the rules of the thriller, but it does remind us, with  all the subtlety of a cathedral bell, that ideas – dangerous, dazzling, world-changing – still live and die… in books. 😉

Patterns in the Labyrinth

• Locations: Always real, always grand, from Rome’s basilicas to Spain’s mountain monasteries, to medieval Prague.
• Themes: The eternal tug-of-war: faith against science, past against progress, ideas against weaponization.
• Villains: Each one an extremist, whether cloaked in religion, intellect, legend, or ideology.
• Tropes: Codes in art, a brilliant woman ally, a ticking clock and Langdon himself, steady as ever, always in his Harris tweed.

And Dan Brown’s Hidden Secrets?

Beneath codes, riddles, and midnight chases, Dan Brown’s secrets lie in the obsessions that drive his stories. At the heart of each novel is the fragility of truth. The question of who owns history and how easily belief can be bent by power and fear. His cities are never just scenery but living presences, pressing down on Langdon through real shadows, their stones heavy with memory.

Again and again Dan Brown circles the tension between faith and doubt, where tradition collides with disruption and belief bleeds into skepticism. Knowledge itself is never safe in Brown’s world. It can illuminate or destroy. While his villains thrive in twisting it into weapons and his heroes fight to reclaim it as light.

And threading through it all is human obsession: in art, science, religion. It reminds us that the fiercest puzzles are not carved in marble or painted on canvas, but in the restless human heart.

Why We Keep Following Langdon?

Dan Brown doesn’t so much reinvent the wheel as polish it until it gleams. Yet within the familiar beats each novel holds a mirror to the anxieties of its moment: conspiracies in The Da Vinci Code, pandemics in Inferno, the AI debate in Origin.

Langdon never really changes (or grows old). That’s the comfort. He’s our guide through Europe’s cathedrals and America’s monuments, a (professor) man out of place, clutching his Mickey Mouse watch as the world teeters on the edge.

And maybe that’s the secret. Brown’s books read like midnight chases through history itself, breath caught in your throat, as if the stones under your feet might just whisper the next clue. For truth in fiction, why readers ask for it and why it matters, manifests on every page.