In The Templar Legacy, he was forced out of his peaceful existence as a bookseller in Copenhagen when his ex-boss Stephanie Nelle got into trouble. Next, his son Gary, in The Alexandria Link, was kidnapped. Now in the Charlemagne Pursuit, he finds out that his father, Forrest Malone, who he thought died in a submarine accident in the North Atlantic, was actually aboard a secret nuclear vessel lost on a highly classified mission beneath the ice shelves of Antarctica.
Steve Berry manages to weave a complex plot in this book. Parallel with Cotton Malone’s adventure with the wealthy (and shapely!) blonde twin sisters Dorothea Lindauer and Christl Falk in search of the missing nuclear vessel, Stephanie Nelle has her hands full contending with the US President, the two Deputy National Security Advisers Edwin Davis and Diane McKoy, and the ambitious naval commanding officer Admiral Langford Ramsey.
The Charlemagne Pursuit has the characters being “played” against one another. This is perhaps Berry’s determined effort to keep an element of suspense throughout the book unlike in his previous works where he laid all his cards on the table all at once.
Berry has enjoyed himself so much in this episode with Cotton Malone that he has indulged him with an affair with one of the twins. He has also made his usual bad/executioner guy not so elegant this time. Charlie Smith is a far cry from the suave Christian Knoll in The Amber Room but has more in common with the Russian police bad guys in The Romanov Prophecy.
Berry is definitely on a roll in this book. He has managed to seamlessly interconnect the stories from the time of Charlemagne, to Hitler’s predisposition for the Aryan race, and the US’s top secret mission to Antarctica culminating in Cotton Malone’s finding the body of his father frozen in time and the lost city somewhere in Antarctica which Charlemagne, the Nazis, and the Americans have been long looking for.
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