And by my reckoning, I say it'll happen, oh, sometime in the fall of 2006. Even in the midst of Hillel Italie's by-rote trend piece for the AP, Mark Tavani (who edits one of the chief pretenders to Dan Brown's throne, Steve Berry) tempers the enthusiasm:

He believes that booksellers will eventually become more selective and that comparing something to "The Da Vinci Code" won't be enough.

"Only the ones that are great will continue to sell," he says. "But people will still be interested in fact-filled fiction. I think people want to learn things from their fiction books and will continue to look for that. So the next big thing in fiction will again be fact based, but different from `The Da Vinci Code.'"

The irony, at least to me, is as this particular trend goes towards its inevitable peak (though publishers have high hopes for titles like Javier Serra's THE SECRET SUPPER, Kate Mosse's LABYRINTH, Raymound Khoury's THE LAST TEMPLAR, and further into the future, Juan Gomez-Jurado's GOD'S SPY) its diametric opposite -- urban fantasy -- shows few signs of letting up, if several properties that are about to make the submission rounds after the new year follow through on the advance buzz built from said authors getting multiple offers of representation...