Black Order

A fire in a Copenhagen bookshop sets off a pursuit that spans four continents. Two deaths point to a scheme to take a Bible once owned by Charles Darwin, the naturalist who shaped modern evolutionary thought. Commander Gray Pierce of SIGMA Force is drawn into a puzzle rooted in Nazi Germany and in grim experiments carried out in a deserted laboratory hidden inside a mountain in Poland.

Far away, a remote monastery high in the Nepalese Himalayas is gripped by a kind of madness, and its Buddhist monks have begun to turn on one another with cannibalism and torture. Dr. Lisa Cummings, a young American physician sent to look into the atrocity, becomes the target of a ruthless assassin working for powerful interests who want the matter kept quiet at any price. Her one ally is a stranger who has come to the monastery as a pilgrim, Painter Crowe, the leader of SIGMA Force, an elite unit of American scientists and special operatives. He is already displaying the same troubling illness that destroyed the monks' minds.

Gray Pierce must now protect Painter and Lisa while SIGMA Force works to expose a plot a century in the making, one that could upend the existing global order and reshape humanity's future. The book blends a sweeping historical scope, in the vein of The Da Vinci Code, with fast-paced action, and it is built around revelations meant to recast how readers see humanity's place in the wider order of existence.

James Rollins is a former veterinarian who writes thrillers, and Black Order is part of his SIGMA Force series.