Harold Earl Malone, a.k.a. Cotton Malone is back!
In The Templar Legacy, it was Stephanie Nelle, Malone’s former boss at the Justice Department, who needed help in solving the puzzle of her dead son and husband. In The Alexandria Link, Malone needs Nelle’s help this time when his 16-year old son Gary is kidnapped.
Two of Malone’s pals from The Templar Legacy also show up to lend their assistance - Henrik Thorvaldsen, a rich, eccentric Danish and Cassiopeia Vitt, a wealthy, intelligent, highly skilled female Moorish engineer whose specialty is Middle Ages architecture.
Malone this time is up against the Der Orden des Goldenene Vliesses (The Order of the Golden Fleece) a European economic cartel composed of 71 members governed by a Circle of five Chairs. The Blue Chair, who is elected for life, heads both the Order and the Circle. The Blue Chair is presently the billionaire Alfred Hermann, owner of European steel factories, African mines, Far Eastern rubber plantations, and banking concerns worldwide. Malone is also up against some powerful people in the White House.
The Order has tasked Dominic Sabre, known as die Klauen der Adler (the Talons of the Eagle), to use Gary as bait so that Malone can be led to reveal the whereabouts of George Haddad, a Palestinian biblical scholar, referred to as the Alexandrian Link. It is believed that the Alexandrian Link has been able to find out the location of the lost library of Alexandria which had the greatest concentration of knowledge on the planet and which stood for 600 years until the middle of the 7th century when the Muslims finally took control of Alexandria and purged everything contrary to Islam. Copies of half a million scrolls, codices, maps, were purportedly stored in the library of Alexandria.
Berry has definitely improved in the Alexandrian Link. He was able now to build a semblance of suspense and almost right to the end, has managed to keep readers guessing who between O. Brent Green, US Attorney General and Larry Daley, Deputy National Security Adviser, was in cahoots with the US Vice President in the plot to assassinate the US President while on a trip to Afghanistan. He also did a clever trick with the disappearance of the Alexandrian Link.
We also get to meet in Alexandrian Link, Pam Malone, Cotton’s ex-wife lawyer (she has decided to keep the name Malone after the divorce so she shares the same name as her son). We sympathize with Mrs. Malone here a bit. While Cotton has repeatedly berated the shortcomings of his ex-wife, it has come up in the search for the lost library of Alexandria that Cotton has not been only an absentee husband and father but has had affairs in the past which led to the breakdown of the marriage. At least Berry has given the poor woman a break in this book.
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