A guide to Steve Berry and the Cotton Malone series
With the twelfth in the Cotton Malone series The Lost Order publishing in April, we go right back to the start with this handy guide to all things Steve Berry.
The Cotton Malone series
The Templar Legacy
The ancient order of the Knights Templar possessed untold wealth and absolute power, until the Inquisition destroyed them and their riches were lost forever.
But some people don’t believe in ‘forever’.
Ex-agent Cotton Malone used to work for Stephanie Nelle in the US Justice Department. Now Nelle wants his help to crack a series of puzzles that have confounded experts for centuries – and could lead to the legendary lost treasure of the Knights Templar.
The Alexandria Link
A hidden treasure. A forgotten truth.
Cotton Malone is in trouble. His son has been kidnapped and his bookshop in Copenhagen attacked, all because he is the only man alive who knows the whereabouts of the Alexandria link – the means of locating the most important cache of ancient knowledge ever assembled: the legendary Library of Alexandria, which vanished without trace fifteen hundred years ago.
Now, Malone is forced to join the search for a forgotten truth hidden within that vast literary treasure – a truth that, if revealed, will have grave consequences, not only for Malone, but for the balance of world power . . .
The Venetian Betrayal
For ex-field agent Cotton Malone the stakes have never been higher: a deadly virus that could wipe out civilisation as we know it – and a cure that lies buried in the past.
A secret international coalition has created a lethal biological weapon. Whoever develops the cure will control the future of global warfare. Yet that cure could already exist, buried centuries before with Alexander the Great.
When Malone hears about it, he joins the hunt for Alexander’s long-lost tomb. His quest soon becomes a harrowing fight for truth that has unimaginable repercussions…
The Charlemagne Pursuit
Ex-agent Cotton Malone wants to know what really happened to his father, officially lost at sea when his submarine went down in the north Atlantic in 1971. But when he uses his government contacts to obtain the submarine’s sealed file, he finds he is not the only person looking for answers.
Malone is in the line of fire when he is attacked in an attempt to take the file. He is pitched into a lethal power struggle between Dorothea Lindauer and Christl Falk, twin sisters whose twisted ambition takes sibling rivalry to new levels.
Malone and the twins embark on a dangerous adventure involving Nazi explorations in Antarctica, US government conspiracies, and a series of cryptic historical clues built into the legend of Charlemagne. Forced to choose a side when neither can win, Malone is determined to uncover the truth behind his father’s death – but will he be able to escape his own?
The Paris Vendetta
12.40 a.m. Copenhagen. Cotton Malone wakes up to find a stranger in his house, bearing bad news: Malone’s closest and most dangerous friend, Henrik Thorvaldsen, is in serious trouble – and the men who want to kill him are on Malone’s doorstep.
Thorvaldsen has been tracking a shadowy group called the Paris Club. Not only does he believe that they are about to trigger a global financial meltdown, but also that one of the club’s members murdered his son, Cai, two years ago. Thorvaldsen won’t rest until he has avenged his boy’s death.
Dragged into his friend’s schemes and secretly under pressure from the US government to stop both Thorvaldsen and the Paris Club, Malone soon discovers that the key to defeating the conspiracy and saving his friend’s life – and his own – lies in the past, and an astounding treasure that Napoleon took to his grave.
The Emperor’s Tomb
Hearing that his old friend Cassiopeia Vitt is in trouble, Malone follows the few clues he has and realises that they are in the middle of something huge, involving Russian and US oil interests and a centuries-old secret.
After stumbling across two dead bodies and into the crosshairs of his former boss, Malone finds himself in a race to unravel the mystery of an emperor’s tomb, a sinister society, and a deadly battle between two ruthless men for supremacy in China – and the world.
The Jefferson Key
Cotton Malone has been called on to defend his country’s safety in many exotic locations around the world, often using his knowledge of history to get to the heart of mysteries and conspiracies stretching back for centuries. But never has the danger been quite so close to home.
A stunning opening sets the tone of explosive action and mind-bending intrigue as Cotton battles an extraordinary group of families whose unseen influence dates back to the pages of the U.S. Constitution – and whose thirst for power is about to be satisfied by the cracking of a code devised by Thomas Jefferson himself.
The King’s Deception
Former Justice Department agent, Cotton Malone, travels to England and finds himself caught in a dark conspiracy born long ago, in the time of the Tudors.
Now both the CIA and MI6 seem to be competing to uncover the mystery and, for Malone, supposedly on holiday with his son, Gary, it’s not just the action which comes thick and fast. When Gary disappears, Malone is forced into a race against time, as he battles to decipher a puzzle that leads him from the Middle Temple to the chapel at Windsor Castle, from an Oxford college to the sewers beneath Hampton Court.
With assassins, traitors, spies, and dangerous disciples of a secret society closing in, Malone discovers that the solution to the mystery will not only draw him into a lethal trap, but force him closer to his own troubling past.
And a shocking revelation.
The Lincoln Myth
September 1861: All is not as it seems. With these cryptic words, a shocking secret passed down from president to president comes to rest in the hands of Abraham Lincoln. And as the first bloody clashes of the Civil War unfold, Lincoln alone must decide how best to use this volatile knowledge: save thousands of American lives, or keep the young nation from being torn apart forever?
The present: In Utah, the fabled remains of Mormon pioneers whose nineteenth-century expedition across the desert met with a murderous end have been uncovered. In Washington, D.C., the official investigation of an international entrepreneur, an elder in the Mormon church, has sparked a political battle between the White House and a powerful United States senator. In Denmark, a Justice Department agent, missing in action, has fallen into the hands of a dangerous zealot – a man driven by divine visions to make a prophet’s words reality. And in a matter of a few short hours, Cotton Malone has gone from quietly selling books at his shop in Denmark to dodging bullets in a high-speed boat chase.
All it takes is a phone call from his former boss in Washington, and suddenly the ex-agent is racing to rescue an informant carrying critical intelligence. It’s just the kind of perilous business that Malone has been trying to leave behind, ever since he retired from the Justice Department. But once he draws enemy blood, Malone is plunged into a deadly conflict – a constitutional war secretly set in motion more than two hundred years ago by America’s Founding Fathers.
From the streets of Copenhagen to the catacombs of Salzburg to the rugged mountains of Utah, the grim spectre of the Civil War looms as a dangerous conspiracy gathers power. Malone risks life, liberty, and his greatest love in a race for the truth about Abraham Lincoln – while the fate of the United States of America hangs in the balance.
The Patriot Threat
The 16th Amendment to the Constitution legalized federal income tax, but what if there were problems with the 1913 ratification of that amendment? Problems that call into question decades of tax collecting, and could even bring down the US economy. There is a surprising truth to this possibility – a truth wholly entertained by Steve Berry in this fast-paced thriller.
His protagonist, Cotton Malone, once a member of an elite intelligence division within the Justice Department known as the Magellan Billet, is now retired. But when his former-boss, Stephanie Nelle, asks him to track a rogue North Korean who may have acquired some top secret Treasury Department files – the kind that could bring the United States to its knees. Malone is vaulted into a harrowing twenty-four-hour chase that begins on the water in Venice and ends in the remote highlands of Croatia.
With appearances by Franklin Roosevelt, Andrew Mellon, and a curious painting that still hangs in the National Gallery of Art, Steve Berry’s trademark mix of history and suspense is 90% fact and 10% exciting speculation.
The 14th Colony
Shot down over Siberia in what was to be a simple meet-and-greet mission, ex-Justice Department agent Cotton Malone is forced into a fight for survival against Aleksandr Zorin, whose loyalty to the former Soviet Union has festered for decades into an intense hatred of the United States.
Before escaping, Malone learns that Zorin is headed for North America to join another long-term sleeper embedded in the West.
Armed with a Soviet weapon long thought to be just a myth, Zorin is aided by a shocking secret hidden in the archives of America’s oldest fraternal organization, the Society of Cincinnati. Past presidents used this group’s military offensive – including advice on the invasion of what was to be America’s 14th Colony – Canada.
Inauguration Day for a new President of the U.S.A. is only hours away. Zorin’s deadly plan is timed to bring about political chaos.
In a race against the clock from Russia to the White House itself, Malone must not only battle Zorin, he must also confront his deepest fear, a crippling weakness that he’s long denied but one that now jeopardizes everything. Steve Berry’s trademark mix of fact, fiction, history and speculation is all here in this fast-paced and utterly compelling new thriller.
The Lost Order
The Knights of the Golden Circle was the largest and most dangerous clandestine organization in American history. It amassed billions in stolen gold and silver, all buried in hidden caches across the United States. Since 1865 treasure hunters have searched, but little of that immense wealth has ever been found.
Now, one hundred and sixty years later, two factions of what remains of the Knights of the Golden Circle want that lost treasure – one to spend it for their own ends, the other to preserve it.
Thrust into this battle is former Justice Department agent Cotton Malone, whose connection to the knights is far deeper than he ever imagined. At the center is the Smithsonian Institution – linked to the knights, its treasure, and Malone himself through an ancestor, a Confederate spy named Angus “Cotton” Adams, whose story holds the key to everything. Complicating matters are the political ambitions of a reckless Speaker of the House and the bitter widow of a United States Senator, who together are planning radical changes to the country. And while Malone and Cassiopeia Vitt face the past, ex-president Danny Daniels and Stephanie Nelle confront a new and unexpected challenge, a threat that may cost one of them their life.
From the backrooms of the Smithsonian to the deepest woods in rural Arkansas, and finally up into the rugged mountains of northern New Mexico, The Lost Order is a perilous adventure into the dark past of the United States, and a potentially even darker future.
Standalones
The Third Secret
What is the Third Secret?
It is rumoured to be a prediction so shocking that it has been locked away for over eighty years. Could this be what is drawing Pope Clement XV to the Vatican archive, night after sleepless night?
When Father Colin Michener is sent on a secret mission to the highlands of Romania, he is pitched into a vortex of suspicion, deceit, murder and forbidden passion. Suddenly, he is forced to face the very thing that has so distressed the Pope – and to unravel a mystery that will shake the world.
The Romanov Prophecy
History is being made and Miles Lord has a ringside seat. The people of Russia have voted to bring back the tsar, a ruler to be selected from the distant relatives of Nicholas II, who was murdered along with the rest of the Romanov family in 1918.
Miles has been asked to run a background check on one of the candidates. But excitement turns to terror when Miles is nearly killed by gunmen.
Suddenly, he is racing across continents with only a cryptic utterance by Rasputin, made at the time of the Romanov massacre, as his guide. The implications of this prophecy are earth-shattering – not only for the future tsar and mother Russia, but for Miles himself.
The Columbus Affair
Tom Sagan is staring down the barrel of a gun – literally. He has lost everything he ever loved: his job, his wife, his daughter, his reputation.
And – what hurts most – he knows the story which ruined his career as a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist was a set-up, a trap. But he can never prove it. They – whoever they are – have beaten him.
And then his daughter calls him.
But Alle doesn’t want to forgive him. She wants information.
Her postgraduate research into Christopher Columbus has put Alle in touch with Zachariah Simon, a supremely wealthy man with a powerful interest in both Columbus and Tom Sagan.
What is the connection between the Sagan family and the man who ushered in a new age when he sailed for the Americas in 1492?
To find out, Tom must embark on his own journey of discovery, and enter a world of danger and betrayal, of history and deadly conspiracy.
What he finds could change the world forever.
The Amber Room
Rachel Cutler loves her job and her kids, and remains civil to her ex-husband, Paul. But everything changes when her father dies under suspicious circumstances, leaving behind clues to a treasure called the Amber Room, one of the most intriguing mysteries of the last century.
Desperate for the truth, Rachel takes off for Germany, with Paul close behind. Before long, they’re in over their heads. Locked into a treacherous game with professional killers, Rachel and Paul find themselves on a collision course with the forces of greed, power and history itself…
