In his latest Cotton Malone thriller, Berry takes on contemporary history as he weaves another tale of conspiracy and intrigue. Malone becomes entangled in an issue that harkens back to his first assignment with the Justice Department. Eighteen years prior, Malone was a navy attorney on the brink of career suicide when DOJ lawyer Stephanie Nelle offered him an assignment to recover a rare coin allegedly lying at the bottom of the ocean off the Dry Tortugas in the Caribbean. What seems like a simple assignment turns into a dangerous mission involving Cuba, the FBI, and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The narration is told mostly in flashback, as Malone remembers the twists and turns of that first case. As fast-paced and exciting as all his previous books, this is another winner in the author's best-selling series. VERDICT Berry's fans will not be disappointed. He has a knack for presenting alternative history that seems as though it might be true. [See Prepub Alert, 9/25/17; April 2018 marks the 50th anniversary of King's assassination.]—Sandra Knowles, South Carolina State Lib., Columbia

Berry stalwart Cotton Malone is involved with FBI-Justice Department contention over an FBI file regarding Martin Luther King's assassination. With a national one-day laydown on March 20.

Bestseller Berry's 13th thriller featuring U.S. government operative Cotton Malone (after 2017's The Lost Order) is an effective conspiracy yarn centered on Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. In the present, Malone has a secret meeting in Atlanta with an unnamed man who sent him a note stating, "Fifty years have passed. Bring them." Flash back to 18 years earlier. Malone, a member of the JAG Corps, is recruited by the Justice Department's Stephanie Nelle to handle a special assignment—to retrieve a waterproof case containing a stolen Double Eagle coin, worth millions, from a sunken boat off the south Florida coast. Malone makes the dive, only to find that he hadn't been told the truth; the case is also the target of some armed men and turns out to contain confidential documents relating to an FBI program connected with King's murder in Memphis in 1968. Berry makes Malone accessible to newcomers by presenting his numerous rookie mistakes as a field operative, but the anticlimactic reveal may disappoint some readers. 400,000-copy announced first printing. Agent: Simon Lipskar, Writers House. (Mar.)