Berry pushes the envelope further. He posits in the book that when the Knights Templar’s head Jacques de Molay was burned at the stake in Paris in 1314, the secrets of the organization died with him.
The newly-elected master of the Knights Templar, Raymond De Roquefort, believes that he is very near to finding the Knights Templar’s lost knowledge and once he finds it, he would be able to restore the Order to its former glory.
De Roquefort, however, has failed to take into consideration that his immediate predecessor knew that De Roquefort would wrest the Knights Templar’s leadership from the seneschal and has placed into motion an elaborate plan as soon as De Roquefort took over the Order. De Roquefort also failed to contend that Stephanie Nelle, widow of Lars Nelle and head of the Magellan Billet of the Justice Department, would be as tough as nails. (Lars Nelle was believed to have solved the mystery of the missing knowledge of the Knights Templar.) Moreover, De Roquefort could not have foreseen that the book’s hero, Cotton Malone, a retired lawyer of the Justice Department, would step out of his hibernation and come to the assistance of Stephanie Nelle, whom he has worked under for several years.
The quest for the Knights Templar’s missing knowledge (and lost fabulous wealth!) brought the concerned parties zooming across Copenhagen and then to France.
The Templar Legacy follows Steve Berry’s formula that after much chasing and exchange of firepower, the good guys find what they’re looking for. What’s just deflating about this book is that Berry, after trying to build a crescendo, rapidly brings the book to a conclusion. The reader goes, “Whaaat? What was that all?” The clues are too obvious, the missing knowledge and treasure too easy to find, and the bad guys too brazen and stupid. One wonders why it took eight centuries to solve the puzzle.
I am definitely giving the points to Dan Brown for telling a better story about the Knights Templar in his “The Da Vinci Code.”
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