Thursday, January 30, 2025

Joan Leotta Reviews: The Medici Return by Steve Berry

 

Please welcome back author Joan Leotta to the blog today….

 

Review of Steve Berry’s The Medici Return by Joan Leotta

The Medici Return (Cotton Malone)

Book 19 of 19: Cotton Malone  | by Steve Berry  | Release Date Feb 11, 2025

 

 

This one I received in advance of its pub date from the publisher through NetGalley.

 

This is the 19th in Berry’s series featuring Cotton Malone, an intrepid detective now working for a secret US agency. Through them Malone becomes involved with helping the Catholic church with a sticky problem calling for confidentiality and break in skills. Malone, armed with those skills , his eidetic memory, and flair for languages (helped by same) ships off to Italy to find evidence of wrongdoing by a cardinal of the church. Who hired him? Vatican. Who is the villain? Another arm of the Vatican—so many secrets here! And oh yes, the Medici! (A 500 year old mystery enters in)

 

When it comes to popes, the Medici were no slouches. When it comes to dirty dealing, the same. Plot issues here span centuries and  connect to modern day crimes. One of the things I absolutely love about this book is the setting in Italy—Sienna, which I only got to know in 2023, Florence where I spent a lot of time while a student in Bologna, and oh yes, the Vatican museum and my beloved Rome.

 

Each of these carries a wonderful weight of historical interest and intrigue. Enough for ten books. In this case, Sienna  and its annual Palio, a free for all of an historic horse race becomes a central element to the plot. Berry is ingenious as to how he works this into his tale about finding = an ancient document. I applaud his creativity and oh yes, I must applaud the horsemanship of Cotton Malone as well. Heroes such as cotton Malone are often invested with far-beyond-normal abilities to deal with things like taking over the jockey role in a bareback race, the Palio. I was happy to suspend disbelief and bear down with Malone as he leaned over the neck of his steed and pushed forward to the goal while other jockeys tried to trip them up and a gunman had a rifle trained on Malone.

 

Wait, do you think all of this distracted me from the main mystery? Who killed the Swiss guard in the book’s early pages? The mysterious missing Medici era document that would cost the church billions of dollars if found? The two or three other subsequent murders and attempts on Malone’s life that follow? Nope.

 

Never fear—Berry is a master juggler of plot elements. These balls are never out of sight. To draw on another metaphor, he weaves all of the threads cleverly, carefully and at just the right moment, inserts one than then another element together to keep readers on track even as the plot twists and turns with more gyrations than that round, stone track in Sienna’s main piazza.

 

I’m only a so-so Malone fan in general, in spite of good dialogue and plotting,  but this book brought out Berry’s writing skills and took me back to a city (Sienna) I enjoy, and had me traipsing through Rome and Florence, two cities I love, while still captivating me with the plot, so I must give this book a five star recommendation.

 

Both for fans of Malone, occasional readers of the series such as myself and dare I say—even if if you have never read Berry’s Malone series before, I think you will enjoy this fast-paced well and deviously plotted book.


Five stars

 


 

Amazon Associate Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/4aDY6hu

 

 

 

Joan Leotta ©2025

Joan Leotta plays with words on page and stage. Her poetry, essays, cnf, short stories, and articles are widely published. Mysteries are favorite things to read.. short and long.. and to write.

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