One of the hundred books a year I read:

Before he wrote The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown’s debut novel focused on the National Security Agency and the art of cryptography—code breaking.

Head Cryptographer Susan Fletcher is summoned to the NSA bunker of a powerful supercomputer that can decode any coded message in minutes. Except on this Saturday, the machine has been furiously crunching through an intercepted program for hours without any success in penetrating its secrets.

The designer of the program, a former programmer of the NSA’s supercomputer, is offering a new unbreakable code to the highest bidder. Though the NSA doubted that such a code existed, they also know the man is one of the few people capable of such a creation. They would be willing to buy the secret themselves at any price…except the man died earlier that day in Paris. As he took his last breaths, he handed off a ring to a stranger, a ring that might hold the key to the code.

As forces pursue the ring in France, cryptographers race to understand the mysterious computer program before the world finds out the threat to its own security.

I haven’t read a book in a single sitting in a long time, but I simply couldn’t stop turning the page until I finished.