Steve Berry

The current President, Cotton Malone's ultimate boss, is determined to put an end to this criminal "Commonwealth" (and not let himself be assassinated in the process). But first, Malone must complete the delicate task of locating a page torn from the 18th Century Congressional Record, recording the authorization given to the "Commonwealth". Malone must follow a convoluted trail from the museum in Thomas Jefferson's estate at Monticello, where the famous Founding Father left a message in code of which the numerous visitors are not aware, and leading to a mysterious seaside cave on a desolate shore, where a glass panel protects an ancient document from the fury of the breaking waves.

In 2012 and 2013, Berry's historic preservation work was recognized by the American Library Association, which named him spokesperson for National Preservation Week. Among his other honors is the Royden B. Davis Distinguished Author Award; the 2013 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award given by Poets & Writers; the 2013 Anne Frank Human Writes Award; and the Silver Bullet, bestowed in 2013 by International Thriller Writers for philanthropic work. He was also appointed by the Smithsonian Board of Regents to serve on the Smithsonian Libraries Advisory Board to help promote and support libraries in their mission to provide information in all forms to scientists, curators, scholars, students, and the public at large. A 2010 NPR survey named The Templar Legacy one of the top 100 thrillers ever written.

Berry first appeared in print with his historical thrillers The Amber Room and The Romanov Prophecy in 2003 and 2004. A practicing attorney at the time, Berry had been writing fiction since 1990, and it took him 12 years and 85 rejections before selling a manuscript to Ballantine Books. Berry credits the nuns who taught him in Catholic school with instilling the discipline needed both to craft a novel and to find a publisher.

Steve Berry (born September 2, 1955) is an American author and former attorney currently living in St. Augustine, Florida. He is a graduate of Mercer University's Walter F. George School of Law. He was a trial lawyer for 30 years and held elective office for 14 of those years. He is a founding member of International Thriller Writers—a group of more than 4,200 thriller writers from around the world—and served three years as its co-president.

In the book's present, this "Commonwealth" of privateers/pirates remains very active into the 21st Century, and wield considerable power behind the scenes. They no longer derive their profits from outright piracy on the high seas, having shifted into up-to-date lucrative forms of organized crime. But their leader, on board his private yacht, maintains "the old pirate traditions" such as "walking the plank" (in an early chapter, this is applied to an unlucky accountant whom the pirate leader wrongly suspected of betrayal).

According to the book, in the very first years of the United States, the Continental Congress granted a "perpetual" Charter to a secret "Commonwealth" of privateers, which was founded during the American Revolution and rendered useful service to the young US. In later years, however, these "privateers" (in fact, pirates) acted mainly for their own private benefit, engaging in manifestly illegal activities while relying on that original Congressional authorization, and strongly resisting any attempt to disband them. In fact, all four US Presidents who got assassinated while in office - Abraham Lincoln in 1865, James A. Garfield in 1881,William McKinley in 1901 and John Kennedy in 1963 - had tried to oppose this "Commonwealth" and got assassinated as a direct result; the pirates had, in each case, located a person who had a reason to hate the President and manipulated him into unknowingly carrying out their design. Other Presidents, like Woodrow Wilson during WWI and Franklin Roosevelt in WWII, knew of this Commonwealth, recognized its secret role and made secret use of it - and thus avoided being assassinated.