Cotton Malone returns in Steve Berry's latest thriller The Bishop's Pawn (#757). This time he's exploring conspiracies surrounding the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. That in itself is an interesting topic, but this novel marks a departure for Mr. Berry. This is his first full-length narrative written in the first person, and if you're a follower of this series, we meet Cotton Malone at the very beginning of his career with the Magellan Billet when Stephanie Nelle, his boss, first seconds his services as a young JAG lawyer at the Jacksonville, Florida naval station.
Cotton is assigned to retrieve a package from a private boat anchored near Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas. He's told by Ms. Nelle that it contains an extremely rare, and illegal to own gold coin - a Double Eagle. He soon realizes that there is much more at stake here, and that it concerns Martin Luther King, Jr. Trusting the wrong person here could get him killed.
Almost all of the action is set in Florida, including my home town. From the description in the book, it's not clear to me that Steve Berry actually set foot here, since his descriptions didn't jibe with the reality. Oh, well. Cotton Malone does meet with a character in a cemetery in Port Mayaca, Florida, near Lake Okeechobee, where a mass grave of 1,600 black victims of the 1928 Hurricane are buried. In his Notes at the end of the novel, Mr. Berry does say that the cemetery is real,, so my husband and I went exploring. The cemetery is there, all right, with a marker on the side of the highway noting that the bodies are buried there, but we couldn't find the obelisk in the graveyard he mentions in the book marking the actual burial spot. Sadly, their grave is unmarked.
If you haven't read any of Steve Berry's previous best sellers, The Bishop's Pawn might not be a bad book to start with.
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