Okay, now I think this is even a bit much for me: People writing books explaining Dan Brown’s next book before it’s published.

It  sounds like an Onion headline, but two books now look not to Brown’s past but to his future—or, rather, they look to his past so they can look to his future.

Secrets of the Widow’s Son: The Mysteries Surrounding the Sequel to the Da Vinci Code by David Shugarts (with a foreword by leading Brownologist Dan Burstein), out from Sterling this week, is the more ambitious effort.It’s a parsing of fansites and Brown interviews as well as of the themes that seem to preoccupy the author in earlier books. Brown himself gets a treatment normally reserved for late, great thinkers ("It appears Brown has read and studied a variety of occult theories of Western cultural history") while material in previous books is "reverse-engineered" to determine where he’s going, both with the Freemasons in The Solomon Key and beyond.