Cotton Malone, of Templar Legacy fame, can't stay away from trouble. Like many other former operatives, he longs for the quiet life of a bookseller, so he buys a rare bookshop in Copenhagen and settles into a new vocation. But his dreams of days spent ruminating over antiquarian editions vanish with the revelation that his son has been kidnapped. Perhaps to italicize that point, somebody torches his shop. The kidnappers have only a single demand, but that imperative is impossible: They want "the Alexandria link," the key to the whereabouts of the ancient lost library of Alexandria. Malone holds the key, but something prevents him from relinquishing it. That painful conundrum serves as the engine for this Da Vinci Code-style thriller.