Book Log 2017 #36: The Lost Order by Steve Berry

The Knights of the Golden Circle was an organization from the 19th century that looked to create a "golden circle" of slave states encompassing the Confederacy and various Western Hemisphere countries. After the Civil War, the group is rumored to have gone underground to continue their struggle. And that's where Cotton Malone comes in.

The story is that the remaining Knights are having a little civil war of their own, with the group split between keeping their caches of silver and gold hidden for use in the future, while the other wants to cash in and foment the revolution they've always wanted. This somehow involves the Smithsonian Institution, one of Cotton's forebears who was a Confederate spy, and the team of the Speaker of the House and a US senator's wife, who want to make some changes to the country and see the Knights as a convenient tool to do so.

It's another perfectly cromulent US-based story for Malone, better if you don't spend too much time thinking about the story and the hype used to build the plot into something it's not (I'm having a hard time believing the Knights were ever the most powerful and/or dangerous secret society in America). We'll all be better off when Malone gets back to Europe so he can shoot up some cathedrals or whatever.