The Lost Symbol

A Race to An End

by Susaan E. Rowland-Moore 

Book Review--The Lost Symbols by Dan Brown

     The Lost Symbol catches the reader’s attention from the beginning with its fast-paced plot and innovative twists and turns. For this reader, the minute Robert Langdon entered the scene, I felt I was being reunited with an old friend.

     Robert Langdon believes he has been summoned to Washington by his old friend and mentor Peter Soloman, a high-ranking Mason, to speak to an audience in the Capitol building. Unfortunately upon his arrival he discovers there is no audience. What Robert does find is Peter Soloman’s severed, tattooed hand positioned in such a way that it points toward the 1865 painting of George Washington that is part of the Rotunda’s dome. In this painting, George Washington is depicted as an ascending deity. Furthermore, Langdon recognizes that the hand has been positioned to resemble “the Hand of the Mysteries.”

     Langdon points out that the man holding Peter Soloman prisoner, the man who cut off Peter’s hand and managed to get it past a sophisticated metal detection system and highly trained security guards, then leave it posed out in the open on the floor of the Rotunda—one of the Capitals busiest tourist attraction, is not only mentally unstable, but highly educated. Robert states that, “. . . the Hand of the Mysteries is a sacred invitation . . .”

     That this educated, unstable person calls himself Mal’akh, which in Hebrew means “angel,” Mal’akh is as bizarre and irrational a villain as the albino monk Silas in The Da Vince Code. Mal’akh has trained himself to be a chameleon of the highest degree and over the years has become a very wealthy, muscled, tattooed eunuch who is desperate to find a hidden Masonic pyramid he believes contains the power of transformation. Despite everything Mal’akh appears to possess: status, wealth, worldliness, etc., he is desperate to transform into something other than what he is. So through Mal’akh’s Machiavellian plots and schemes combined with Robert Langdon’s gift to solve unusual puzzles,

     Dan Brown begins to weave his story. Dan Brown does not disappoint in this book. He tweaks our imagination, inspires us to question our spoon-fed realities, and weaves it all into a first rate metaphysical adventure that this reader immensely enjoyed.

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