NICE BRICKWORK FROM DAN BROWN

       "The Lost Symbol", the follow-up to Dan Brown's 2003 mega-bestseller "The Da Vinci Code", has been released, and you don't have to be a Freemason to enjoy it - although that wouldn't hurt.
       Like "angels and Demons", published in 2000, and "Da Vinci Code", "The Lost Symbol" solves puzzles, analyses paintings and reveals forgotten histories.
       Brown's tireless hero Robert Langdon tracks down a legendary Masonic treasure despite special-ops squads dogging him and a bizarre killer who has kidnapped his dear friend and mentor.
       There is one mystery, though, that remains unsolved after three books.
       Will Langdon ever get to rest?
       You'd think a 46-year-old Harvard symbologist's most strenuous chores would be grinding his Sumatran coffee beans in the morning or persuading bored undergrads to appreciate hidden meanings in the world around them.
       Langdon does these things, but he's also the guy who survived an antimatter explosion at the Vatican and a Paris manhunt and uncovered the truth about the Holy Grail (although, according to the new novel, he's kept this a secret).
       So Langdon is unlikely to get any rest anytime soon. After all, he specialises in what all esoteric evildoers need: rituals and their transcendent meanings.
       Consider an early incident in "Symbol", a scene that 's as gruesome and allusive as the opening of "Code", in whice a dying, bloodcovered curator in the Louvre arranges his body into a puzzle.
       Langdon arrives in Washington, invited by his wealthy friend Peter Solomon, a highranking Mason, to deliver a speech in the Capitl Building.
       The moment he enters the rotunda, however, Langdon discovers there is no speech.
       The "invitation" has been faked by an 1865 painting of George Washington depicted as a pagan god.
       As horrific as this is, Langdon recognises that the grisly object resembles something called "the Hand of the Mysteries".
       "It seems the man we are dealing with, in addition to being mentally unstable, is also highly educated," Langdon says. "This hand is proof that he is well versed in the Mysteries as well as their code of secrecy ... The Hand of the Mysteries is a sacred invitation."
       That educated, unstable person calls himself Mal'akh ("angel" in Hebrew), and in him Brown gives us a villain as unique, zealous and eerie as teh albino monk Silas in "Code".
       Mal'akh is a muscled, tattooed eunuch, a chameleon-like figure who seeks a hidden Masonic pyramid because, the legend goes, it contains the power of transformation.
       It seems Mal'akh gained the trust not only of Peter but also of Peter's sister Katherine, a scientist through whom Brown introduces the theme of science versus magic - not to mention the possibility that a wedding might be in Langdon's future.
       Like the "cryptex" in "Code", an antique object aids Langdon and Katherine on a hunt across and beneath the city. It's a hunt in which they're helped and hindered by characters including the blind dean of Washington's National Cathedral and the gnomic director of the CIA's Office of Security, Inoue Sato (don't mess with her).
       All of this is going to feel very familiar to readers of the previous Langdon books, even though Brown has shifted from foreign places to plant his thriller firmly on American soil.
       That, of course, is fine for Langdon: He finds this country's past as rich and mysterious as any other. "Seriously," he tells his students, "Washington, DC, has some of the world's finest architecture, art and symbolism. Why would you go oversas before visiting your own capital?"
       Why, indeed. Some people believe Freemasonry's origins in mediaeval craft guilds include a darker, conspiratorial side. Historians point out that the secrecy of Scottish Rite Freemasonry, in particular, has led to its being the least understood of Masonry's variants - a situation Brown exploits to the fullest with depictions of occult ceremonies.
       Hidden knowledge takes many shapes in "Symbol". Alchemists, Egyptians and rabbi sages are invoked, and so are the US government's eavesdropping tactics in the war on terror, superstring theory and the New Agesounding study of noetics, which Katherine believes one day will enable the mind to bring about real changes in the physical world.
       Brown's narrative moves rapidly, except for those clunky moments when people sound like encyclopaedias ("The sacred symbol of the Hebrews is the Jewish star - the Seal of Solomon - an important symbol to the Masons!").
       But no one reads brown for style, right? The reason we read Dan Brown is to see what happens to Langdon: We want to know if he will overcome long odds to uncover Mal'akh's motives and a cunning plan that, while not involving antimatter, is a major threat to national security.
       And yet, it's hard to imagine anyone, after reading "Symbol", debating about Freemasonry in Washington, the way people did Brown's radical vision of Jesus and Mary Magdalene in "Code".
       "The Lost Symbol" is more like the experience on any roller coaster - thrilling, entertaining and then it's over.