The secret is how to die.

Since the beginning of time, the secret had always been how to die.

The thirty-four-year-old initiate gazed down at the human skull cradled in his palms. The skull was hollow, like a bowl, filled with bloodred wine.

Drink it, he told himself. You have nothing to fear.

As was tradition, he had begun this journey adorned in the ritualistic garb of a medieval heretic being led to the gallows, his loose-fitting shirt gaping open to reveal his pale chest, his left pant leg rolled up to the knee, and his right sleeve rolled up to the elbow. Around his neck hung a heavy rope noose—a “cable-tow” as the brethren called it. Tonight, however, like the brethren bearing witness, he was dressed as a master.

If you enjoyed the two previous novels about Robert Langdon, you will feel right at home going through the Brownian Motion with him one more time as the symbologist is called from his home to hurry to the United States Capitol, only to find his friend and mentor Peter, the head of the Smithsonian Institution, who also happens to be a high-ranking Freemason, partly dismembered in the Capitol Rotunda, partly kidnapped by a tattooed castrate. Langdon has to embark on a frantic chase across Washington putting together clues left behind by the Founding Fathers, risking his life, as well as that of Peter's sister, who as a scientist in the esoteric field of Mind-over-Matter has just made earth-shattering discoveries, with the CIA and the Freemasons egging them on, and not just from the sidelines.