IT’S been almost four years since Professor Robert Langdon, the renowned Harvard symbologist, last embarked on a mystery.

In 2009, Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, which was set in Washington, was met with a lukewarm reception. Perhaps the winning formula he’d struck upon in the best-selling Da Vinci Code and Angels And Demons had started to seem tired.

With Inferno, Brown wisely returns the action to Europe, the setting for his first two books.

But the formula is the same: Langdon meets a very attractive, intelligent young woman, this time Dr Sienna Brooks, and they try to unravel a mystery with its roots in ancient literature to save the world from a deadly plague, while escaping from some evil types trying to kill them.

Brown cleverly adopts a new device here though – we first find Langdon coming round in a hospital bed with what seems to be retrograde amnesia. He can’t remember a single thing about the past 48 hours – and doesn’t know why he’s suddenly in Florence.

Langdon and Dr Brooks end up in a race against time across Florence and Venice to Istanbul to find a hidden deadly virus, which is set to wipe out masses.

Brown is famously not the most literary of writers but he is a master of intrigue and clever plotting - he throws twists at his readers right up to the close.

Dan Brown is...

  • The author of numerous bestselling novels but is best known for The Da Vinci Code, one of the best selling novels which also led to Hollywood films of his novels, starring Tom Hanks.
  • On the 2005 list of the 100 Most Influential People in the World made by TIME Magazine, whose editors credited him with “keeping the publishing industry afloat”.
  •  He is a graduate of Amherst College and Phillips Exeter Academy in Massachusetts, where he later returned to teach English before focusing his attention full time to writing.