Steve Barry's latest novel The King's Deception (#305) and e-book novella prequel The Tudor Plot are about secrets with the power to change lives and the fates of nations forever. Cotton Malone and his young son Gary are lured to London by an unknown nemesis to deliver a teen-aged runaway to the Metro Police, and are set up as pawns by a crafty British spymaster. It's a dangerous game with fatal consequences. Not surprising when considering the game was set in motion by the Tudors.
Steve Berry works with an interesting premise in this book based on some of the oddities surrounding Elizabeth I in The King's Deception. Also in the mix here is the infamous release by the Scottish government of the Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi in 2008 for "humanitarian reasons". The US is trying desperately to stop this from happening, but they are meeting only resistance from the British government. The CIA is willing to allow agent Blake Antrim one last shot at preventing al-Megrahi's transfer to Libya. But Sir Thomas Matthews, the legendary head of MI6, is equally determined to stop him at any cost. Destroying Cotton Malone at the same time would be a bonus for him.
Berry has used the public's fascination with all things Tudor to put together a plausible political thriller. Henry VIII and Elizabeth I are both larger than life figures with more than enough drama and eccentricities to fill any number of volumes. Berry has deftly used the Tudor family dysfunctions to reflect those of the modern day Malone family. You're bound to learn something you didn't know before about both families.
It's also fun to see so many famous locales used as the settings in these books: Buckingham Palace, the Tower of London, Hampton Court. Even if you've never been to England, you've seen them pictured in movies and on TV. There's always the thrill of the familiar when you recognize such places in books and can easily picture yourself there.
What's a little jarring here is that in the prequel, The Tudor Plot, Berry uses alternate history through a plot to overthrow the current British monarch, Queen Victoria II, in order to introduce the character of Sir Thomas Matthews and set up the conflict between him and Cotton Malone. In The King's Deception it's back to fictional reality. One notable item about The Tudor Plot for Cotton Malone fans: we finally learn his real first (and middle!) name! Cotton still won't divulge how he came to earn his nickname, though. We'll just have to look forward to learning that story in some future book.
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