Taken from Carinhall

Marzano knows what commercial historical-thriller readers want and delivers it in dense, efficient installments: a secret door behind a bookcase, a wine cellar with a hidden crate of Egyptian statues, a Knights of Malta subplot, a Sicilian art heist complete with ether rags and a getaway van. The Malta cellar sequence — the lever behind the bookcase, the spider web across Brian's face, the hinge pins knocked out rather than the lock forced — is the book's best-executed set piece; it has the patient, procedural texture that genre readers of this stripe (Dan Brown, Steve Berry) come for, and it earns its length by giving Brian something to actually do with his hands.

The book also understands escalation and cliffhanger pacing: within three chapters we get a resurrected partner, a pregnancy reveal, an art heist, and a promise of a mysterious new Interpol case, each chapter closing on a hook rather than a resolution. That's a real structural skill, even if the prose delivering it is often flat exposition ('Nina began a daily routine...') rather than scene.

Where the book earns real credit for its intended reader is texture and research-density — the Templar history lecture, the Knights of Malta minutes, the Section 14.4 bureaucratic detail — all signal a writer who did his homework and wants readers to feel smart while turning pages. That's a legitimate, specific pleasure of this subgenre, and Marzano supplies it generously, chapter after chapter, without slowing the plot machinery underneath it.