Medici Return – Berry Steve (2025)

Former Justice Department operative Cotton Malone is asked to help the Swiss Guard determine whether Cardinal Jason Richter has been involved in bribery and theft. It is a favour for Stephanie Nelle, his former boss at the Magellan Billet, who is doing a favour for the Vatican. But nothing is as it seems. Three hundred thousand euros are discovered, a Swiss Guardsman is murdered, and a killer targets both Cotton and the cardinal. Together, they are drawn into a search for a forgotten document: a sixteenth-century Pledge of Christ issued by Pope Julius II, revealing a debt owed by the Vatican that remains valid five centuries later and is now worth trillions of dollars. When the trail to collecting the debt leads Cotton to the famed Medici family of Florence, whom history says died out without heirs centuries ago, he realizes that two more matters are also at stake: who will become Italy’s next prime minister and who will be the next pope. From a quiet hilltop village in central Germany to Siena, with its celebrated Palio horse race, and finally the historic piazzas, churches and crypts of Florence, Cotton uncovers the answers one by one, with everything hinging on whether and when the Medici return.