The Templar Legacy

Cotton Malone used to be a top operative for the U.S. Justice Department. Now he sells antiquarian books in Copenhagen and has little interest in espionage. A call he did not expect pulls him back into the work he left behind.

The trouble starts when someone attempts a violent robbery against Stephanie Nelle, his former supervisor. She is far from home on business unrelated to national security. She holds vital clues to a series of puzzles, centuries old and spread across Europe, that point toward the lost wealth and forbidden knowledge of the Knights Templar.

The order once held enormous riches and authority over kings and popes. It was destroyed in the fourteenth century by the Inquisition, and its treasure vanished. Scholars and fortune-hunters have chased it ever since.

Stephanie has a rival. Raymond de Roquefort, a zealot with an army of assassins, wants the treasure and needs what she knows. Cotton joins the contest to even the odds, whether she wants him or not.

The deeper he digs into the Templar conspiracy, the clearer it becomes that the treasure is not what anyone assumed. Its true nature could alter the modern world, and the wrong owner could do real damage with it. This is a thriller that moves through European puzzle trails, with a conspiracy and a contest for power at its core.