Da Vinci Code on Trial

Hot on the heels of the Million Little Pieces controversy, Dan Brown, author of the Da Vinci Code, is being sued for copyright violations in a London court as seen in today's USA Today and every other news outlet. Accompanying the lawsuit article is a piece by Carol Memmott discussing other books that are riding on the success of the Da Vinci Code formula. She refers to it as a "religious/historical thriller genre," a neat description of this kind of book. The other kind of books that came out of the Da Vinci Code phenomenon was a spate of non-fiction books which tried to explain or discount Dan Brown's central ideas such as The Secrets of the Code and many, many others of that ilk.
Again, in publishing, it seems that there is no such thing as bad publicity, because requests for any book in the news always go up.