Having read both books my opinion is that Lewis Perdue is smoking crack with talks of copyright infringement.
California- Best-selling author Dan Brown is suing a California novelist who accused him of stealing ideas for his blockbuster "The Da Vinci Code" from two 1980s novels.
In a lawsuit filed in Manhattan Federal Court, Brown says he never read the work of Lewis Perdue before penning the thriller that has sold more than 8 million hardback copies.
He's asking a judge to rule that he never infringed Perdue's copyrights - and end what he called Perdue's efforts to piggyback on his book's success.
In early September, Perdue's lawyer warned Brown and publisher Random House he would sue if they did not reach a settlement by Sept. 13, according to Brown's lawsuit.
Perdue has taken no action. But he maintains he has a linguistics expert who will back up his charges, and he has accused Brown of "carefully crafted spin."
The controversy has not hurt sales of Perdue's books. One of his novels, "The Da Vinci Legacy," was published in 1983 but reissued this year. It hit the New York Times best-seller list, and Perdue has optioned the book's film rights, according to the lawsuit.
"The Da Vinci Code," Brown's fourth novel, follows a fictional Harvard symbologist's attempts to unravel secrets hidden in Leonardo da Vinci's paintings.
