The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown

This was our first read together - mainly because we were on a trip, the CD player wouldn't work and I had one pre-release copy of the book and two readers vying for dibs. I read and loved the DaVinci Code so had high expectations for this book. I wasn't disappointed. The story may have been slightly less gripping for me because of the subject matter - having had family members involved in the Masonic Lodge for years, they just didn't stir my imagination as the dark, covert, keepers of apocolyptic secrets - but it was still the page-turner I expected from Dan Brown. There were times that the story got bogged down in the details and history, but never long enough to make me lose interest. Towards the end, I discovered one of the many benefits of "couples reading". When the story seemed to be progressing down gruesome and disturbing paths, I handed the book off to Dave and let him censure the details to only those absolutely necessary for the progression of the story. Fortunately, the passages he needed to edit for the sake of my ability to sleep were far fewer than I feared. (Aside to authors: I have an imagination. Please just give me the minimum trauma and horror and I guarantee I will fill in the rest.) Several of the plot twists at the end really weren't surprising. We had predicted them, sometimes several hundred pages earlier, and since I know we aren't especially adept as sleuths, perhaps there should have been less foreshadowing. My best advice is to take this book for what it is -a fiction thriller meant to entertain - and avoid getting caught up in the controversies and consiracy theories. Then it is a fun, fast-paced read well worth the time.