If you liked Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code...
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- The Amber Room by Steve Berry
- When her father dies under suspicious circumstances, Atlanta judge Rachel Cutler finds everything she loves threatened by the rival quests of two art collectors who seek one of the world's greatest treasures, lost after the Second World War.
- Celestial Chess by Thomas Bontly [available through CWMARS]
- A celestial chess game between the devil and a 12th-century monk crosses the ages.
- The Sixth Lamentation by William Broderick
- When a suspected Nazi war criminal demands sanctuary from his church, Father Anselm finds his subsequent investigation paralleled by a search by Lucy Aubret, whose grandmother was betrayed by the Nazi criminal when she secretly worked to rescue Jewish children.
- The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell
- Endeavoring to decipher a five-hundred-year old text that weaves a mathematical labyrinth within a love story, researchers Tom Sullivan and Paul Harris obtain a diary that may contain the key to the code, but when a fellow researcher is killed, they realize that the book contains a dangerous secret.
- The Eighth Day by John Case
- Part-time private investigator Danny Cray is hired to discover who is behind a clever scheme to destroy the reputation of a notorious billionaire -- an assignment that takes him around the world and unexpectedly hurls him into a sinister world where nothing is what it seems.
- The Genesis Code by John Case
- In a suburb of Washington, D.C., Joe Lassiter learns that his only sister and her young son have been killed in a fire that destroyed their house and soon discovers that the fire is part of a much larger conspiracy that he must stop.
- The Bookman series by John Dunning
- The Bookman series features Cliff Janeway, a former cop turned bookseller. In his first outing, Booked to Die, Janeway is enrolled as a bounty hunter by a Denver detective agency to bring back from Seattle a woman who stole a rare book. Instead, he finds himself protecting the lady from people after the book. Other titles in the series include The Bookman's Wake, The Bookman's Promise, and The Bookwoman's Last Fling.
- Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco
- A wily group of editors devises a mock formula for tapping the mystical powers of the universe, only to set off a series of mysterious disappearances.
- The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
- In 1327, Brother William of Baskerville is sent to investigate charges of heresy against Franciscan monks at a wealthy Italian abbey but finds his mission overshadowed by seven bizarre murders.
- Headlong by Michael Frayn
- When a frustrated philosopher uncovers what he believes is a lost painting by Bruegel in a boorish neighbor's basement, he embarks on a hilarious quest to separate the work from its owner.
- Mary, Called Magdalene by Margaret George
- Draws on the Bible and secular historical research to present a fictional portrait of Mary of Magdala as she becomes part of Jesus's disciple circle and comes into a realization of her faith.
- The Assassini by Thomas Gifford
- The murder of Sister Valentine, an activist nun, leads her brother, lawyer Ben Driskill, on a deadly quest for her killer, a search that leads to a secret order of assassins that the Catholic Church has deployed for centuries at times of grave threats.
- The Case has Altered by Martha Grimes
- While Melrose Plant impersonates an antiques expert, Richard Jury investigates the scene of a baffling double murder in the Lincolnshire fens, after the bodies of two local women turn up and Jenny Kennington, Jury's long-time flame, becomes the prime suspect in the crime.
- Codex by Lev Grossman
- An investment banker is sent by his firm to organize a collection of rare books for a mysterious, important client and realizes that there may be a medieval codex hidden among the volumes that surprisingly parallels a computer game's addictive virtual reality world.
- Enigma by Robert Harris
- A fictional account of the desperate efforts to break the Nazi's Enigma code takes place in a British railway town, a struggle that becomes complicated by the pivotal disappearance of a beautiful cryptographer.
- Inspector Guido Brunetti series by Donna Leon
- Guido Brunetti, a police commissario in Venice, Italy, is featured in several novels. In Death in a Strange Country, while investigating the murder of an American soldier, he comes up against the Mafia, the government, the U.S. Army, and toxic waste. Other titles include Dressed for Death, Death and Judgement, Acqua Alta, and Through a Glass, Darkly.
- Manuscript Murders by Roy Lewis [available through CWMARS]
- Bookseller Matthew Coll bids on behalf of an American university for an Elizabethan manuscript written by Emilia Lanier, the woman some scholars believe to be the Dark Lady of Shakespeare's sonnets. When the original owner is then murdered, Coll starts to investigate.
- The Gemini Contenders by Robert Ludlum
- Andrew and Adrian Fontine, antagonistic twin sons of Vittorio Fontine-Cristi, search separately for a small Greek monastery vault and its priceless ancient documents, hidden high in the Italian Alps.
- The Dido Hoare mysteries by Marianne MacDonald
- Dido Hoare is a bookseller in London. In Ghost Walk, when an old customer of her antiquarian book business is found murdered, Dido Hoare is compelled to investigate the matter and find the killer, but during her probe, she learns details about the customer's dark past that make her fear for her own safety. Other titles include Road Kill and Die Once.
- The Eight by Katherine Neville
- In the 20th century, Catherine Velis is a computer expert with a flair for music, painting, and chess who, on her way to Algeria at the behest of the accounting firm where she is employed, is invited to take a mysterious moonlighting assignment: recover the pieces of an old chess set missing for centuries. In the midst of the French Revolution, a young novice discovers that her abbey is the hiding place of a chess set, once owned by the great Charlemagne, which allows those who play it to tap into incredible powers beyond the imagination. These two parallel stories spin out in Neville's audacious debut.
- The Book of Q by Jonathan Rabb
- A modern-day priest uncovers a sixth-century conspiracy that threatens to re-awaken in the present, and his investigation carries him to Croatia where he will confront the consequences of an eight-year-old affair.
- Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte
- As Lucas Corso investigates the authenticity of a manuscript by Alexander Dumas --- received from a man later found hanged -- he becomes embroiled in a search for a rare book of satanic lore, pursued by a sinister stalker and a mysterious woman.
- Daughter of God by Lewis Perdue
- Evidence of a female messiah executed by the Church in the fourth century has been stolen from its safe hiding place in the Vatican, and now all hell is breaking lose in the modern world as a result.
- The Confessor by Daniel Silva
- In the wake of a Munich writer's assassination, Mossad agent Gabriel Allon and Vatican priest Pietro embark on dangerous journeys that reveal long-buried secrets affecting the fates of millions of people.
- In the Hand of Dante by Nick Tosches
- The discovery of an original manuscript of Dante's Inferno in the Vatican archives finds writer Nick Tosches heading for Rome to authenticate the find.
- The School of Night by Alan Wall
- A sinister novel of obsession follows Sean Tallow, who has two goals in his life -- to be just like his sophisticated friend Daniel Pagett and to expose the truth about the School of Night, an enigmatic group of Elizabethans who clustered around Sir Walter Raleigh -- as he desperately tries to solve the riddle surrounding this strange society, unexpectedly plunging himself into a dark world.
- The Prophetess by Barbara Wood
- In December 1999, Catherine Alexander discovers six ancient papyrus scrolls that reveal a hidden history of the world and its religions, but a seventh scroll, containing unimaginable power, is missing and Catherine must dodge government agents, Vatican operatives, and more to locate it.
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