Angels & Demons ended up being a pretty good book despite my original assumptions about it. It was written after The DaVinci Code, but intended to be a prequel to it… I was skeptical. And I will admit that for the first 200-250 pages of the book, I was interested, but kept saying to myself, “Sure… like this sort of adventure would happen to the same guy TWICE in his life… riiiiight…” I think it would have been better had the author chosen to use a different charactor for one of the 2 books, but whatever. But, right at about page 250, you get hooked and then it’s a book that you can’t put down.

Like the DaVinci Code, there was tons of action, lot’s of conspiracy, codes to break, and a beautiful and intelligent woman to run through all of the drama with him. The main charactor, Robert Langdon, who is a symbologist at Harvard, is once again summond in the middle of the night by an unknown party needing his help to solve a bizarre murder. The question first asked is obviously who killed this Swiss physicist and why? A cryptic symbol has been burned into the chest of the victim and Robert immediatly recoginzes it as a calling card of a centuries old underground organization with a serious dislike for the catholic church and religion in general. The Illuminati. The book goes on to explain The Illuminati and the connection to science and the reasons for the dislike of the Catholic Church. This book does a much better job of being less predictable than The DaVinci Code. Although it is a lot darker…

There are a lot of twists and turns, and it ends in a way that I never expected. There are a lot of really interesting ‘facts’ in the book that make you really think about religion in general even if it is all meant to be fictional. There was a point in the book that I was actually thinking how lovely it would be to believe in something so strongly and how the way that it was being explained actually made a lot of sense. But, just as I was getting comfortable with that idea, I was reminded of why I dislike organized religion in the first place. I liked this book a lot actually now that I think about it. Ambiagrams, conspiracy, Catholic Popes, and a tiny bit of sexual tension.

If you like books about the evils of the Catholic Church then this is the book for you :) I might read it again!