The King's Deception: A Novel (Cotton Malone)
After an exciting departure from his Cotton Malone novels (The Columbus Affair, 2012), Berry returns to the series formula. When Malone’s 15-year-old son is briefly kidnapped in London, the spy-turned-bookseller discovers he has inadvertently stumbled upon an international plot that involves secrets about Queen Elizabeth I and the impending release from prison of one of the men behind the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 270 people. It takes awhile, but Berry does forge a thinly plausible connection between a modern-day terrorist act and the last Tudor ruler of Britain. Berry populates the novel with the usual assortment of characters—the shifty intelligence agent, the stalwart investigator—and even offers us an ancient society that will stop at nothing to keep Elizabeth’s shocking secrets from getting out. Fans of the series will no doubt enjoy this one, although it breaks no new ground, holding tightly to the series format. The galley circulated for review contains a troubling chronological inconsistency—depending on which internal evidence you listen to, the story is set either in 2005–06 or 2009—but this could be cleared up when the book goes to print.      HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Berry’s books, best-sellers all, have been translated into 40 languages with more than 15 million copies in print in 51 countries. --David Pitt