16 August, 2013

#BookReview :: The King's Deception (Cotton Malone #8) by Steve Berry

There is a secret from our history - 500 years old - startling in its revelations and devastating in its political impact. A secret that has, thankfully, stayed hidden.  Until now.
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.

This is my first time reading a book from the Cotton Malone series even though I have heard about them for the longest of times. 

Cotton Malone is a retired agent for the Department of Justice who is now a proud owner of a bookstore. While taking a trip with his teenage son, he agrees to escort a teenage fugitive back to London as a favour to an old connection. When they arrive at the London Airport, it doesn’t take long for things to go horribly wrong. Before anyone has a chance to react, Malone’s son and the fugitive goes missing. Now Malone finds himself involved in a case that revolves around one of the biggest Tudor secret and also is connected to the release of a Libyan terrorist from a Scottish prison.

I am no expert in world history. So, I love reading historical fiction as they give me a chance to research and learn about the topics covered in the novel. In this case I had a chance to look into the Tudor Dynasty – and more specifically into King Henry VIII and his daughter Queen Elizabeth I. It was an amazing experience to then come back to Steve Berry’s work of fiction involving these characters. 

Cotton Malone is a character who is easy to love. He is quick witted and level headed. It would have been so easy for him to lose his cool when his son goes missing, instead he buckles up and gets to detecting. His son Gary has his father’s mind with a touch of healthy curiosity. Ian is street smart and makes quite an interesting character. While these characters make the read interesting with their charm and wit, there are a couple of characters whom you would love to hate and they make the book even more interesting. Blake Antrim, a CIA operative is one such character.

History, mystery, drama and action filled pages of this novel keeps turning and you hooked to it.


Buy this Book



1 comment:

  1. Cotton Malone ALWAYS leaves me wanting more. Number 8 has come and gone, and I still don't know how he got his name - maybe in the next one. The only regret I have after reading this book, is having listened to Berry tell Elaine Charles on the Book report radio show (archived interview I found on their website) that he wrote a short story "The Tudor Plot", as an introduction to this book. I suspect he wanted to fortify the believability of the Bisley boy.

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