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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
The success of "The Da Vinci Code,"a new thriller by Dan Brown, isn't exactly a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, but it certainly is astonishing, because novels by unheralded writers like Dan Brown almost never debut at the top of the Times best-seller list, as "The Da Vinci Code"did, a few weeks ago. The secret, it seems, was an advance-copy bombardment of booksellers, authors, and reviewers--ten thousand free books delivered to readers whose opinions supposedly matter enough to stimulate the traffic in editions that are not free.
A small testament to the wisdom of this approach can be found, embedded like one of Brown's esoteric clues, in the book's acknowledgments. There, among the names of curators, cryptologists, and academics, is the name Francis McInerney; McInerney, as Amazon enthusiasts may know, is one...
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