The Columbus Affair: A Novel (with bonus short story The Admiral's Mark)

A family s secret, a ruthless fanatic, and a covert arm of the American government all are linked by a single puzzling possibility:

What if everything we know about the discovery of America was a lie? What if that lie was designed to hide the secret of why Columbus sailed in 1492? And what if that 500-year-old secret could violently reshape the modern political world?

Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Tom Sagan has written hard-hitting articles from hot spots around the world. But when one of his stories from the Middle East is exposed as a fraud, his professional reputation crashes and burns. Now he lives in virtual exile haunted by bad decisions and a shocking truth he can never prove: that his downfall was a deliberate act of sabotage by an unknown enemy. But before Sagan can end his torment with the squeeze of a trigger, fate intervenes in the form of an enigmatic stranger. This stranger forces Sagan to act and his actions attract the attention of the Magellan Billet, a top-secret corps of the United States Justice Department that deals with America s most sensitive investigations. Sagan suddenly finds himself caught in an international incident, the repercussions of which will shudder not only Washington, D.C., but also Jerusalem. Coaxed into a deadly cat-and-mouse game, unsure who s friend and who s foe, Sagan is forced to Vienna, Prague, then finally into the Blue Mountains of Jamaica where his survival hinges on his rewriting everything we know about Christopher Columbus.

Don t miss Steve Berry s short story The Admiral s Mark and a sneak peek of his new novel, The King s Deception, in the back of the book.