Notes: Part thriller, part mystery, part history. Michael Baigent, Henry Lincoln and Richard Leigh, authors of The Messianic Legacy, spent over 10 years on their own kind of quest for the Holy Grail, into the secretive history of early France. Their tenacity and thorough research found a tangled and intricate story of politics and faith, and a story that might lead you to understand the lineage of Jesus Christ in an entirely new way. Best of all, it's written like a modern day thriller!

Notes: One of the art world's greatest unsolved mysteries, the location of the Amber Room, is at the heart of this thriller. The murder of the last person believed to know its whereabouts throws ex-spouses Rachel and Paul in the path of two competing members of the Retrievers of Lost Antiquities. Lovers of art will appreciate the thoroughly-researched and detailed descriptions.

Notes: In this "prequel" to the Da Vinci Code, world renowned Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is summoned to investigate the bizarre murder of a brilliant physicist and the disappearance of his final discovery--antimatter. He discovers evidence of the unimaginable: the resurgence of an ancient secret brotherhood known as the Illuminati. Together with the physicist's daughter, Langdon begins a frantic race to stop the powerful brotherhood from destroying the Catholic Church and quite possibilty civilization as we know it.

Notes: Prompted by the murder of his sister and her son, American detective Joe Lassiter investigates the worldwide killing of children believed to be carrying the genes of Catholic saints. Spiced with intriguing facts about the information age, this fast-paced and complex puzzle of conspiracy and murder leads Joe to Rome and rural Italy, Washington, D.C, and a remote island off the coast of Maine.

Notes: The year is 1327. Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate. When his delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William turns detective. His tools are the logic of Aristotle, the theology of Aquinas, the empirical insights of Roger Bacon - all sharpened to a glistening edge by wry humor and a ferocious curiosity. He collects evidence, deciphers secret symbols and coded manuscripts, and digs into the eerie labyrinth of the abbey, where "the most interesting things happen at night".

Notes: When two young women in France of 1790 discover the Montglane Chess Service in Montglane Abbey, they recognize its mystic ability to provide anyone playing it with unlimited power and desperately scatter its pieces around the world. But in 1972, computer expert Catherine "Cat" Velis is hired to recover the chess pieces--and is caught up in a nefarious, globe-spanning conspiracy.

Notes: In 1590's Istanbul, the Sultan secretly commissions a great book, but any work of art--an affront to Islam--is dangerous. My Name is Red is a historical murder mystery played amidst the perils of religious repression, a love story, and a story of ideas.

Notes: A meticulously reserached novel on the way we interpret events to suit our purpose. The protagonists are four people giving evidence in a murder in 17th century England. One blames the crime on too much authority, another on the lack of it. Additionally, the novel looks deftly at the controversies of the day, from medical experiments to religious freethinking.

Notes: The Vatican has lost its most closely held secret -- a secret whose exposure could shatter the very foundations of Western religion, shift world power and ignite religious violence the likes of which the world has not seen for centuries. The secret? Irrefutable proof of a female Messiah named Sophia. Born in the Holy Land in A.D. 310, Sophia was known for performing healing miracles. In the present, Zoe Ridgeway, an art broker, visits Switzerland with her husband, Seth, where she expects to purchase the estate of a German art collector. But before Zoe can complete the transaction, she and Seth are drawn into a thousand-year-old web of conspiracy, murder, and intrigue that begins and ends with the mystery of Sophia and all the powerful forces who seek to protect their patriarchies from a divinely feminine truth.

Notes: This 1886 Madrid murder mystery features an old fencing master who still teaches in the age of the pistol. The arrival of a beautiful woman asking him teach her his famous "unstoppable thrust" launches a complex succession of plots and counterplots analogous to the thrust and parry of a fencing match.