Publishers bet on Brown clones:

I
n the early months of 2006, expect a few novels with some very familiar story lines.

Labyrinth, by Kate Mosse, features a rival sect to the Catholic church and a search for the Holy Grail. In The Templar Legacy, a thriller by Steve Berry, a former government agent attempts to unravel a mystery about an order of knights whose power rivaled the Pope’s. Matilde Asensi’s The Last Cato features the head of the Vatican’s secret archive and his efforts to solve a murder with clues dating back to biblical times.

“It’s hard not to have The Da Vinci Code on our minds, as it has become the cultural phenomenon of our time,” says Rene Alegria, publisher of Rayo, a Hispanic imprint of HarperCollins that is releasing the English translation of The Last Cato.

Nearly three years after it was first published, The Da Vinci Codehas more than 25 million copies in print worldwide, inspired dozens of parodies and critiques and increased interest in religious thrillers, art history, Gnostic texts and speculations about the life of Jesus.

With The Da Vinci Code movie, starring Tom Hanks as symbologist Robert Langdon, due out in the spring or early summer, publishers and booksellers expect yet another surge for the novel by New Hampshire author Dan Brown and for books like it.

“This is the hottest trend out there,” says Barnes & Noble fiction buyer Sessalee Hensley. “I think a large part of the Da Vinci Code audience will go for these new books.”

Publishers are counting on big sales.

I predict they will be disappointed. So far all the Da Vinci code clones that I have seen pretty much suck.

Read more at www.nytimes.com/2005/12…