Is there life after death? Dan Brown explores the answer in his new international bestseller, "The Last Secret."

Dan Brown has written a chilling novel , perhaps his best, his most accomplished. An undisputed international bestseller , with a circulation of 500,000 copies in Spanish alone, The Last Secret (Planeta) grips the reader from the first page and doesn't let go until the author's acknowledgments on page 828.

At his recent presentation in Spain, attended by the 56 editors who published his book in as many languages, at the Círculo de Bellas Artes, Dan Brown admitted that his perspective on life after death has changed since this novel.

Let us remember that from The Da Vinci Code to The Last Secret , already sold to Netflix for an eight-chapter miniseries , the writer has seen his popularity grow by approaching fiction from a perspective that makes the plots he develops enormously credible.

Professor Langdon—its protagonist—leads readers through various locations, which the author describes with such meticulous detail that it invites them to immerse themselves in cities like Rome, Paris, New York, Florence, and Madrid, among others. And not only because of the surface area of ​​these "locations," but also because of their catacombs, which are often a rich and unknown part of the world for the general public.

After Angels & Demons , The Da Vinci Code, The Lost Symbol, Inferno , and Inception, The Last Secret takes us to beautiful Prague , to its depths, as spectacular as they are dark. The book, in paperback, contains at the end a map of the sites visited by Langdon – a professor of symbology at Harvard – and his girlfriend, the noetic scientist Katherine Solomon, in their investigation and escape from a murder that triggers the entire story.

It is surprising the amount of data that Dan Brown provides, intersperses and develops, both in the scientific and metaphysical fields, regarding human consciousness and life beyond death , to the point that the reader will be tempted several times to consult this data in parallel in other sources.

The Last Secret is an ambitious novel , given the wealth of technological, scientific, and cultural information it contains. However, it also triggers ongoing debates that are presented throughout its pages as questions: Where are the major global technology companies in their developments into the manipulation of human consciousness? Are the CIA and the Russian FSB (Federal Security Service) currently conducting research on the human mind? How far have we come with Artificial Intelligence (AI), whose most advanced results are still beyond the reach of ordinary citizens?

Dan Brown delves deeply into CIA operations in foreign countries , in the case of the book in the Czech Republic, but his novel also touches on real-life technology programs, which involve real-life companies like those of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and others. Perhaps that's also why the plot of The Last Secret seems so believable.

Not in vain, at the very beginning of the book, he warns the reader with a quote from Nikola Tesla: "The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will advance more in a decade than in all the previous centuries." And then, under the heading "The Facts," he clarifies: "All works of art, artifacts, symbols, and documents appearing in this novel are real. All experiments, technologies, and scientific results are real. All organizations mentioned exist." This already shocks the reader from the prologue.

As soon as it was released, The Last Secret hit the bestseller list . Enjoy Dan Brown, who has no shortage of readers, with over 250 million copies of all his books sold.

After immersing himself in dialogue with scientists, philosophers, religious experts, and others, he has come to the non-spiritual conclusion that the death of the body does not affect consciousness . Therefore, the book's starting point is what happens when we die.

In Prague, in an underground laboratory camouflaged in an ancient castle, we learn from the very first page of the story that the somewhat shady neuroscientist Brigita Gessner is dying at the hands of a strange character and is experiencing an out-of-body sensation.

This crime will trigger the vicissitudes that Langdon and Solomon will experience in just one day in the beautiful Czech capital, from the moment the professor goes out for a run before dawn, when events unfold, until his return to his hotel at seven in the evening, after "fixing the world," metaphorically speaking.

According to Dan Brown, this is a fascinating time because "science and religion are beginning to say the same thing." Regarding AI, the author says it's just in its infancy, but he hopes that, in the future, it won't replace human creativity.

Of course, the future is full of uncertainty like never before, and it can be as chilling as a Dan Brown novel.

The Last Secret , by Dan Brown (Planeta).