The Templar Legacy: A Novel

The Templar Legacy: A Novel

Steve Berry, the author of the book, is the New York Times bestselling author of The Charlemagne Pursuit, The Venetian Betrayal, The Alexandria Link, The Third Secret or The Amber Room. His books have been translated into 37 languages and sold in 50 different countries.

The Templar Legacy, published in February 2006, is a thriller which tries to follow in the steps of The Da Vinci Code. The action of the book features rival groups of the Knights Templar searching for a lost treasure and a lost secret of the order. They unwittingly involve "Cotton" Malone, a former Justice Department agent, now an antiquarian book dealer in Copenhagen. When an unexpected call to action reawakens his hair-trigger instincts, he plunges back into the world he thought he had left behind.

The book 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.