Origin

(Doubleday, $30) Here we go again, said in The Washington Post. Dan Brown is back, along with his Vatican-flouting, code-breaking hero, for “another thriller so moronic you can feel your IQ points flaking away like dandruff.” We touch down in Spain, where symbologist Robert Langdon—Mickey Mouse watch still ticking—has joined a gathering where a computer genius is about to announce a discovery that will invalidate all existing religious doctrine. But before the secret is revealed, the speaker is taken out by an assassin, and with 300 pages to go, I wondered, “Why couldn’t it have been me?” As in Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, the prose here is cringe-worthy, said

in The New York Times. But Langdon’s race through Barcelona to crack another code generates plenty of “gee-whiz excitement,” and a clever use of settings like Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia cathedral affords legitimately intriguing musings about the intersection of science and religion. “Brown and serious ideas: They do fit together, never more than they have in Origin.”