Dan Brown · 2003 · thriller

Dan Brown's 2003 thriller, eighty million copies sold. A murder in the Louvre sets a symbologist and a cryptologist running through Paris and London on a chain of clues about the Grail - and the last of them takes Langdon back to the courtyard he started in.

1. 1
   Louvre, Paris

   The curator Jacques Sauniere is shot in the Grand Gallery and spends his last twenty minutes arranging his own body and a cipher in invisible ink - a puzzle set for the granddaughter who has not spoken to him in ten years.

2. 2
   Saint-Sulpice, Paris

   A monk hunts a false keystone beneath the church's meridian line.

3. 3
   The Depository Bank

   24 rue Haxo, and a numbered vault opened with a ten-digit key that turns out to be the Fibonacci sequence - inside, a rosewood box holding the first cryptex, and a bank president who helps them out in an armoured car.

4. 4
   Chateau Villette

   Sir Leigh Teabing's house at Condecourt, forty kilometres north-west of Paris - where the Last Supper is explained, the figure at Christ's right hand is named as Mary Magdalene, and the plot changes shape entirely.

5. 5
   Le Bourget

   The private airfield north-east of Paris, and a Hawker jet leaving French airspace with three fugitives, a manservant, a bound monk in the hold and a police force one step behind.

6. 6
   Biggin Hill

   Kent, and a landing talked past the waiting police by Teabing in a wheelchair - the point at which the chase becomes English and the clue becomes a knight a Pope interred.

7. 7
   Temple Church, London

   In London the search turns to a knight's tomb and a hidden password.

8. 8
   King's College

   The Research Institute in Systematic Theology on the Strand, and a database search that finds the knight - not in the Temple at all, but Sir Isaac Newton, buried by Alexander Pope, whose name is the pun the riddle turns on.

9. 9
   Westminster Abbey, London

   Newton's grave yields the cipher that unlocks the secret.

10. 10
    Rosslyn Chapel, Scotland

    The quest ends at the Scottish chapel long tied to the Grail legend.

11. 11
    The Inverted Pyramid, Paris

    Langdon wakes in his Paris hotel, walks out and follows the bronze medallions of the Rose Line to the Louvre - and kneels above the inverted pyramid, having worked out that the Grail was under Sauniere's protection the whole time.