The Medici Return

December 16, 2024
Berry’s scorching latest thriller featuring Cotton Malone (after The Atlas Maneuver) finds the retired U.S. Justice Department operative once again battling violent men over events in the distant past. After a dozen years with the government, Malone has started a new life as a bookstore owner. But he’s drawn back into the fray by his former handler, Stephanie Nelle, after the Vatican is roiled by a scandal: a church official on trial for embezzlement and theft has implicated Cardinal Jason Richter—a close friend of the current pope, who will help select his successor—in his schemes. Malone breaks into Richter’s home and verifies that he’s in possession of stolen items, but suspects the cardinal has been framed. The plot thickens when right-wing Italian politician Eric Casaburi claims the Vatican owes him hundreds of billions of euros as a descendant of the Medici family, whose members, centuries earlier, bailed out the church with a sizeable loan guaranteed by the Pledge of Christ. Malone joins church officials on a dangerous search for that rarely issued promissory note. The plot offers few surprises, but series fans are likely to stick it out for the fast-paced, well-oiled action. This may not be top-shelf Berry, but it gets the job done. Agent: Simon Lipskar, Writers House.

January 1, 2025
Five centuries ago, Pope Julius II asked the powerful Medici family for a favor--a very expensive favor--and made a promise, a Pledge of Christ, that the debt would be repaid. But it never was. And now, someone who claims to be a descendant of the Medici family (which history says died out 300 years ago) has come forward to demand repayment. Enter Cotton Malone, former U.S. government operative turned rare-book dealer. The nineteenth Malone thriller finds him trying to find one of two copies of the Pledge of Christ for his former bosses. At stake: the future of the Catholic Church, the fate of Italy, and the truth about the Medicis. (But no pressure, Cotton.) There is a formula to the Malone novels--a present-day mystery tied to an ancient mystery, some deliciously evil bad people, lots of scrapes and near misses--but it's such a winning formula that we never tire of it. Cotton, too, is a marvelous character: world-weary but not jaded, cynical but not close-minded, and intensely curious. Berry's fans will be delighted.

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February 15, 2025
The eternal jostling for power in Rome and the Vatican is juiced by a development that attracts the attention of the Magellan Billet and its foremost alumnus, Cotton Malone. Eric Gaetano Casaburi, secretary of Italy's National Freedom Party, anticipates a decisive victory for the party if Sergio Cardinal Ascolani, the Vatican's secretary of state, will lend his full-throated support. Of course, the Church isn't supposed to meddle in contemporary politics, but Eric makes an offer he doesn't think Ascolani can refuse. Five hundred years ago, Giuliano di Lorenzo de' Medici loaned Pope Julius II ten million florins the Church never repaid. That debt is still legally payable to anyone who proves to be a surviving member of the Medici family, and Eric believes he can prove exactly that. Although Malone, called in to investigate the bona fides of Ascolani's enemy Jason Cardinal Richter, has already found a fortune hidden in Richter's apartment, Richter swears that he's being framed, and the violent deaths of three anonymous functionaries seem to bear him out. So, Malone forges a series of alliances with Richter, with wealthy businesswoman Camilla Baines, and ultimately with an even more surprising party to prevent Ascolani and Thomas Dewberry, a hired assassin who's both a sociopath and a devout Catholic, from swaying the upcoming election in return for Eric's forgiving the ancient debt. An extended closing note shows how inventively Berry mingled history and fiction to weave this tangled web. Readers invested in learning more about the Medicis can be assured that the brief glimpse of them in a prologue set in 1512 is only the beginning. Perhaps the single most striking feature of this latest dose of intrigue is that its title is intended to be taken literally.

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