“The Da Vinci Code” by Dan Brown

In the highly secure Grand Gallery of the Louvre, a collection of the world's most famous paintings smiled down at the dead body of the curator, Jacques Sauniere. The pallid corpse lay on the the parquet floor arranged in a most bizarre fashion - completely naked, the body was perfectly aligned with the long axis of the room., arms and legs sprawled outward in a wide spread eagle, like those of a child making a snow angel. In the throes of death, the curator had used his own blood to draw the five-star pentacle on his flesh: the pre-Christian symbol for the sacred feminine, the divine goddess. Thus is set in motion a thrilling tale of a quest...and a chase. The quest is about the Holy Grail, and the people who are after it - a Harvard professor of symbology, an attractive French cop and brilliant cryptologist (who also happens to be Sauniere's granddaughter), and a British knight. They, in turn, are being chased across Europe by the French police, Interpol, and an albino monk-assassin whose expenses are being covered by the Vatican. At stake is the mystery behind da Vinci's Last Supper, the future of the Catholic church, and a revelation so provocative that it could change the basic assumptions upon which the Christian church is built. (From Booktalking Colorado, http://booktalkingcolorado.ppld.org)