Angels and Demons-by Dan Brown

My book for this marking period's IRP was "Angels and Demons" by Dan Brown. I enjoyed this book a lot. It was about Robert Langdon, a Harvard symbologist who receives an unexpected call at 6 in the morning. The call turns out to be from CERN, a research lab in Switzerland whre scientists try to discover new things about matter and atoms. They called Langdon to investigate the death of one of their most gifted scientists, Leonardo Vetra. Langdon flies to their lab in a super fast flying machine which took him from Massachusetts to Switzerland in one hour. Once he arrived, he spoke to Maximilian Kohler, the director of CERN. Kohler had summoned him to decipher the mysterious symbol on Vetra's chest. Langdon hypothesizes that it is from the Illuminati, an ancient brotherhood which hated religion and the Church. Kohler explains that Vetra was a Catholic priest as well as being a physicist, and his discovery of antimatter proved that the Genesis theory in the Bible was scientifically possible. The Illuminati stole the antimatter, which was also a powerful weapon, and they threatened to destroy Vatican City with the powerful weapon. Langdon joined forces with Vittoria Vetra, Leonardo Vetra's daughter, to save Vatican City before the Illuminati destroyed the city. Along the way, the two had to use cryptic clues from famous Renaissance artists such as Bernini to find the location of antimatter before it blew up at midnight and annihilates the city. As an added conflict, an anonymous caller claims responsibility for kidnapping four cardinals. He plans to kill one cardinal at each hour, starting at eight and concluding at eleven, in churches for everyone to see. They are the four favorites to win the election for papacy, which was also planned to occur that night. So, the two have to rescue the cardinals before they die,find the antimatter capsule, and detonate it safely outside of Rome. All before midnight. I won't give the ending so that it isn't a spoiler for those who want to read it. Personally, I enjoyed it a lot. It was a good thriller, and it didn't have awkwardly slow parts in between. The author also did a good job of adding twists to the story, especially the one at the finish. I would recommend this book for anyone who enjoys thrillers and liked "The da Vinci Code".