The Vatican Candidate: A Harper & Blake Mystery

Fast-forward to the fall of 2018, when Pope Francis announces that he intends to open the Vatican Secret Archives to researchers and historians investigating relations between his predecessor, Pope Pius XII, and the Nazi regime. A week later, masked gunmen kill five people at an isolated Jesuit retreat in the mountains of Sicily. And two weeks after that, the body of a celebrated British historian is discovered in a beach house on Long Island. Aiden Blake, ex–Royal Marine and brother of the dead historian, believes there is a mysterious link between these events, stretching across seventy-five years of history.

He’s right—and history itself will provide the clues. The trail will lead him and his brother’s New York–based researcher, Hannah Harper, across the Atlantic to the hidden bunkers of Berlin, a Gothic castle in South Tyrol, Rome, Sicily, and deep into the past in a bid to find his brother’s killers—and expose a neo-Fascist plot to kill the present pope and replace him with someone more conducive to the party’s own political views and ambitions.