The Da Vinci Code recap

When the curator of the Louvre is murdered and leaves a trail of cryptic clues, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is drawn in as a suspect and flees through Paris with the police cryptographer Sophie Neveu, the curator's estranged granddaughter. The clues lead them into an ancient mystery: a secret society, the Priory of Sion, has for centuries guarded the true nature of the Holy Grail, which the story presents not as a cup but as Mary Magdalene, said to have been the wife of Jesus and the mother of his child, whose bloodline secretly survives. Pursued by police and by a fanatical monk killing on orders from a hidden mastermind called the Teacher, Langdon and Sophie decode riddles hidden in art and history with the help of the Grail scholar Leigh Teabing. Teabing is revealed to be the Teacher, willing to kill to force the secret into the open, and he is arrested. The monk Silas dies, and the bishop who backed him is undone. Most startling of all, Sophie herself is revealed to be a living descendant of the sacred bloodline, and the Grail's resting place is finally located beneath the Louvre.

Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor of religious symbology, is a recurring figure whose expertise in secret societies and hidden iconography has previously drawn him into a dangerous, widely publicized ordeal that made him something of a public name. In this loosely connected new adventure he arrives in Paris on ordinary academic business, once again an outsider whose knowledge of symbols and history will pull him into a deadly mystery.

Late at night in Paris, the curator of the Louvre is murdered inside the museum, and before he dies he leaves behind a set of strange, coded messages. Robert Langdon, in the city to give a lecture, is roused and brought to the scene by the French police, only to realize he is being treated as a suspect. A police cryptographer, Sophie Neveu, secretly warns him of the danger and helps him slip away, and the two set off to decipher the dying man's clues, beginning a frantic chase through the city and into a centuries-old secret.

The mastermind orchestrating the murders is unmasked as Leigh Teabing, the affable Grail historian, who is the hidden Teacher. Obsessed with exposing the Church's secret, he manipulated the fanatical monk Silas, the bishop Aringarosa, and everyone around him, and he is willing to kill to obtain the Priory's guarded knowledge. His scheme unravels, and he is arrested by Captain Fache. Silas dies after being wounded, and Aringarosa, having been used and having lost everything, is left broken but repentant. The novel's central revelation is that the Holy Grail is not an object but a person and a bloodline: Mary Magdalene, presented as the wife of Jesus, whose descendants have been protected in secret for two thousand years. Sophie Neveu is revealed to be one of those descendants, the last of the line, and she is reunited with surviving family she never knew she had. Langdon deduces that the Grail, the sarcophagus of Mary Magdalene, lies hidden beneath the Louvre's inverted glass pyramid, where he kneels in quiet reverence at the close. The secret endures, protected rather than exposed, and Langdon and Sophie part with the promise of meeting again.