| 1. The Tudor
Plot - Steve Berry - Starting off the new year
with a new Steve Berry novel. This was good short story
about Cotton Malone assisting the Queen of England in
fighting an attempt by members of her own family to take
control of the throne. It also has a running theme about
whether Author was a real or invented person but in the
end Malone found Author's tomb in a cave in Iceland.
There is a lot of history presented in this story but I
am not sure what part is real and what part is made up.
Anyway it was a good read and I finished it in one day.
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| 2. The Atlas
Maneuver - Steve Berry - I enjoyed reading The
Tudor Plot above so I thought I would try another Berry
book. Bitcoins and block chains are a big part of this
story which takes place all over the world. In this
story St. John's Bank in Switzerland who hold both WWII
gold and a bunch of bitcoins is trying to convince
central and south American countries to utilize bitcoins
as their national currency. Of course these countries
don't have the full story that the bank, because of its
vast holdings, can manipulate the value of bitcoins to
their advantage. Cotton Malone gets pulled in to do some
simple surveillance for a friend in the CIA of a person
of importance who he later finds out he knows rather
intimately. Turns out this woman is the person who
invented bitcoins and that she is trying to stop the
bank for exploiting these 3rd world countries because it
is contrary to the bitcoin philosophy. Of course
this makes her wanted by all of the players world wide
and so she is captured in turn by the CIA, the Japanese
secret service, the Swiss police and others. In the end,
terrorists blow up the big meeting of the banks'
executives and county representatives seeking the use of
bitcoins. Malone's friend also dies in the attack but
has left a hidden computer program on the bank's
computers that if the bitcoin wallets of the bank are
accessed that the banks bitcoin inventory would be
distributed across all bitcoin owners across the world
which Malone see to. This was a rather long story but interesting enough to make me read it over a couple of days. I also learned some about block chain and bitcoins in the process as Berry always combines facts and fiction in his novels. |