The Templar Legacy
Crime, Historic Fiction, Mystery, Thriller
Steve Berry
Cotton Malone, Book # 1
Random House Publishing Group
February 21, 2006
ebook
514
English
March 3, 2018 March 17, 2018
Cotton Malone, one-time top operative for the U.S. Justice Department, is enjoying his quiet new life as an antiquarian book dealer in Copenhagen when an unexpected call to action reawakens his hair-trigger instincts–and plunges him back into the cloak-and-dagger world he thought he’d left behind.
It begins with a violent robbery attempt on Cotton’s former supervisor, Stephanie Nelle, who’ s far from home on a mission that has nothing to do with national security. Armed with vital clues to a series of centuries-old puzzles scattered across Europe, she means to crack a mystery that has tantalized scholars and fortune-hunters through the ages by finding the legendary cache of wealth and forbidden knowledge thought to have been lost forever when the order of the Knights Templar was exterminated in the fourteenth century. But she’s not alone. Competing for the historic prize– and desperate for the crucial information Stephanie possesses–is Raymond de Roquefort, a shadowy zealot with an army of assassins at his command.
Welcome or not, Cotton seeks to even the odds in the perilous race. But the more he learns about the ancient conspiracy surrounding the Knights Templar, the more he realizes that even more than lives are at stake. At the end of a lethal game of conquest, rife with intrigue, treachery, and craven lust for power, lies a shattering discovery that could rock the civilized world–and, in the wrong hands, bring it to its knees.
About the book
The Templar Legacy is the first book in the series starring Cotton Malone, a former CIA agent, who retired in Copenhagen, Denmark, where he opened a bookshop of ancient books, his long-standing passion. The book begins when his former boss comes to visit him in Copenhagen and even before she can meet Malone finds herself in a chase through the streets of the city when her purse is snatched. Between blackmail, murder, suicide, betrayal and escapes around Europe, will the former CIA agent solve the mystery?
I like this kind of conspiracies, I like hidden secrets, I like treasure hunts, I like the dark side of people, even the most devoted have one, so the plot intrigued me a lot. Style and details not so much. First of all: if the masters were 66 and have “governed” for 18 years (average) from the XII century onward, something isn’t right in the book, because (66×18 = 1188 years governed in total by the masters) +1150 (year of foundation of the templars) = 2338… and the book was written in 2006… we are not in 2300 now… Can someone please explain this detail to me? Yes, I’m that kind of person who counts and looks after these details.
I recognized who was the “traitor” quite soon (i.e. the one who calls de Roquefort) and also who the seneschal really was. Good thing that everything finished well and I must say that they gave me a new vision of Christianity. I am Catholic, but I do not go to church and I am not a practitioner or devoted, I sincerely do not know either what or who to believe in, but the ending touched me. It is not the story that makes us have faith, but it is how they are interpreted. I must say that as a non-devoted/non-believer Catholic, I can see this version of Christianity as true.
And as always when we talk about Jesus Christ, it scares me. Since I was a child, since I first saw the Via Crucis, I have always been afraid that someone will appear to me and tell me that I am not a good Christian, which is a contradiction since I do not believe everything the church says and so I do not believe in life in the afterlife, that the soul exists and that Our Lady can appear in Fatima or Lourdes or in the village near me where no one believed and left (a legend told in the villages around mine).
I read this book for the Popsugar challenge for the “A novel based on a real person” prompt.
