Semi-Entertaining work of "Fiction" - Rated 
Having been only a toddler when this first came out in 1982 I missed out on all the controversy back then. To be honest, having read the book now, I can't see what all the fuss was, and still is, about.
This is pseudo-history, plain and simple. The authors throughout state that this is where the evidence has taken them, even reluctantly. However, one gets the impression that the authors know where they are going from the start, and are making their conclusions fit the evidence. This evidence, it should be noted, includes hypotheses that later on become facts. Similarly, questions which they pose themselves, and are rarely answered, later on become a basis for further "facts" upon which to build their hypotheses.
This is mildly entertaining though, hence the three stars. The bits about freemasonry, grail romances and the links, however tenuous, between the so-called Grand Masters of the Priory of Sion, is pretty mundane reading. The book only gets interesting, for me, when it looks in to the gospels, the last section of the book.
As we now know, the Priory of Sion, with its "Dossiers Secrets" was a hoax, and it is apparent that the authors fell for it.
In conclusion I'd recommend it to anyone interested in this sort of topic, but take it with a pinch of salt.
Mind boggling - until you realise it was all a hoax - Rated
I read this book in the early 90's when I was a student and it's adventurous musings completely blew me away.
UNFORTUNATELY...
BBC2's Chronicle, if memory serves the programme the author's worked on when they unearthed the books 'mysteries' and hit the big time, did a follow up programme years later and discovered that Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln (and Chronicle for that matter) had been had big time. The creepy little French bloke claiming to lead the Prieure De Sion (or however it's spelt) - and therefore by extension was a blood relative of Jesus Christ himself - was actually a professional con man who saw Baigent and Leigh coming a mile off and fed them just enough information to string them along for years!!!
Baigent and Leigh refused to accept the evidence (and well they might because it made them look like complete pratts, not to mention threatening their cash cow) but the evidence was pretty damning. As for all their subsequent speculations concerning the Dead Sea scrolls and their radical reinterpretations of the bible, that mostly turned out to be the result of inept research combined with three extremely vivid imaginations.
Oh well, it was fun while it lasted! And at least they made a lot more money out of it than the conman!!!
This is where it all starts..The Original - Rated 
This is where it all started for me... 10 years and over 140 books later this book is still the best and the one i refer back to as the information contained is excellent.
What a story, whether true, false, fiction or non, it grips you from page 1 to the very end in a mystery that is so compelling and has such wide reaching implications you simply can not put it down.
I only wish the 3 authors had produced more work together.
Gary May
Author: SELLING: Powerful New Strategies for Sales Success
www.garymay.co.uk
Rubbish but a whole heap of fun - Rated
I have to agree with 'gingerburn' and his progression from excitement to disillusion over 3 readings of the book. However, I think it deserves 3 stars because it IS fun to read the first time and, if nothing else, provokes thought. I was still a practising Catholic when I first read the book (I was about 16 or 17 I think) and it started the long process of questioning that culminated in me contentedly deciding I am an atheist. Disregard all the hooey about the descendants of Jesus (who cares?!) and concentrate on the details of how the early Christian church manipulated its own records and broadcast the correct propaganda to ensure it survived with a creditable future. That was an eye opener and it launched me into reading more....
Gripping, but unfortunately complete rubbish - Rated 
Having read this book three times, I feel it might be interesting to offer three short reviews of it, charting my changing opinions as my acquaintance with it grew better.
Reading 1: Truly a thrilling read; inspirational, even. In the single sitting it took to complete the book, I found almost every received idea which I had hitherto accepted as single fact overturned and revealed either as entirely false, or as having a meaning far beyond anything I had ever imagined. History was laid bare, opened up to reveal a great network not only of people but of ideas that had shaped and guided European history for one-and-a-half millennia. The authors had uncovered a remarkable society which had survived in secret since the Dark Ages, and which sought to restore the blood line of Christ to the throne of Europe. My life would never be the same again.
Reading 2: I was baffled. This was no longer the same book which I had devoured so eagerly two years before. Those passages which had so dazzled me were flat, or I could no longer identify them, and the pace had gone. It took me a period of reflection to work out why, but I realised that the book relies on its breakneck pace to keep its narrative going, and that a reader who already knows what is coming around the corner is at a major disadvantage. The nature of this disadvantage is serious: at a second reading one is automatically more critical and scrutinises the evidence more closely, and it was in doing this that, on the one hand the narrative fell apart, but on the other, the glaring flaws in logic, scholarship and writing became apparent. Ideas which were presented as hypotheses in one chapter suddenly became fact in the next, and became the basis for yet more hypotheses which in turn were morphed into incontrovertible truths. The sheer sloppiness of the historical approach shocked me: lack of evidence was taken to be evidence in itself, and absence of proof served to prove anything which lacked evidence. The approach of the book revealed itself to be nothing more than that of a spy novel: a series of clues lead to the revelation of a great global conspiracy. Sadly, that is not the way that good scholarship works. While the effect may be thrilling, what is all too easy to see is that not one of the pieces of evidence which was used to present the case stands up to even the slightest scrutiny, and it is at that point that the book ceases to be worthwhile.
Reading 3: perhaps more motivated by nostalgia than anything else, I returned again to the book to see if I had judged it unduly harshly on my previous reading. If anything, I realised that I had been too lenient. The whole premise of this book (that Christ's bloodline survived in a dynasty of early medieval French kings, later to be taken up by the Cathars, the Knights Templar and a quasi-Masonic organisation) defies rational inquiry, and ignores not only any sane assessment of how history operates, but also the significance of the claim were it to have any merit whatsoever. On the one hand it is nonsensical to believe that there is a shadowy organisation which has lurked in the background of history for one-and-a-half thousand years, and, especially when its leading lights were as disparate as Isaac Newton and Claude Debussy (of course Newton is famous for his interest in masonic matters, but Debussy was hardly in a position to usher in revolution on a political scale, regardless of his brilliance as a composer.) Moreover, it matters not one jot whether Christ's bloodline survived through Mary Madgalene - his children would simply belong to the House of David just as he had done. They would not be Gods, or even able to do especially clever card tricks: the point, if one subscribes to Christian theology, of Christ, is that he was uniquely human and divine. His significance as a human on earth came to an end when he ascended into heaven.
This is one of those galling books which captures the popular imagination and spreads its memes around in the most insidious way, although it would be deeply unfair to accuse the authors of anything so sinister. What they are guilty of is a credulously sloppy approach to writing history, in which unproven and insubstantial evidence is adduced and shoehorned into an absurd thesis which, as they themselves admit, can never itself be proved. Don't waste your time here.
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