Baigent, Michael, et al. Holy Blood, Holy Grail
Non-fiction. A complicated exploration of the Knights Templar, the Catholic Church, and various secret societies including the Priory Zion. The authors assert that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, fathered children, and did not die on the cross but went into hiding, and that his bloodline still survives. Baigent has authored several other books related to this topic.
Berry, Steve. The Third Secret
In this Vatican conspiracy thriller about Pope John Paul’s fictional successor, Pope Clement XV seems mysteriously preoccupied by new information regarding secrets disclosed by the Virgin Mary to three children in Portugal in 1917. When Pope Clement inexplicably commits suicide, his longtime secretary is left to follow the trail where he left off.
Brown, Dan. Angels & Demons
Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is called to investigate the murder of a Swiss scientist found with the word “Illuminati” branded on his chest and a lethal amount of antimatter missing from his lab, sending Langdon on a search to investigate this secret society while a group of terrorists holds four papal candidates hostage.
Caldwell, Ian. The Rule of Four
Four Princeton roommates attempt to solve the puzzle of a 15th century manuscript filled with embedded codes which lead to buried treasure in Rome.
Doetsch, Richard. Thieves of Heaven
A retired thief takes one more job in return for payment of his wife’s medical expenses after she is diagnosed with ovarian cancer. He must steal a set of keys from the Vatican, but these are no ordinary keys - they hold the power to keep humanity out of Heaven.
Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose
While less accessible than Dan Brown’s books, this classic thriller also centers on mysteries within the church. In 1327 Brother William of Baskerville is sent to investigate heresy at an Italian abbey, only to discover a series of bizarre murders.
Folsom, Allan. Day of Confession
An assassin shoots and kills the Pope’s right-hand man; meanwhile, LA entertainment lawyer Harry Addison receives a cryptic phone message from his estranged brother who soon thereafter is killed in a bus bombing. When Harry flies to Rome to collect his brothers remains, he finds that his brother is a suspect in the assassination. He becomes convinced that his brother is not dead at all, and that there is a conspiracy connected to the assassination and the bus bombing.
Khoury, Raymond. The Last Templar
After four horsement dressed as Templars crash through a show of Vatican artifacts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and steal an important coding devine, archaeologist Tess Chaykin teams up with the FBI to search for the missing device and the message it will decode.
King, Ross. Ex-Libris
The proprieter of London’s Nonsuch Books, Isaac Inchbold, is asked to track down an elusive manuscript in the year 1660. However, not only was he kept in the dark about the murders of the previous owners of the manuscript, he is also not the only person looking for it now.
Mosse, Kate. Labyrinth
Two female protagonists, 800 years apart, hunt for the Holy Grail in southwest France. In 1209, a 17-year-old girl is given a book connected to the Holy Grail and flees with it from her city which has come under attack by Crusaders. This is intertwined with a story of a young woman on an archaeological dig in 2005 who finds two skeletons and an engraved labyrinth pattern in a cave, leading her into a series of events duplicating those of her medieval counterpart.
Neville, Katherine. The Eight
A computer expert working in Algeria gets caught up in a search for a chess set once owned by Charlemagne and alleged to have mysterious powers. Napolean, Casanova, the Druids, and Freemasonry all appear in the story which spans from the 1790s to the 1970s.
Perdue, Lewis. Daughter of God
Another religious-based thriller, this one centers on a female Messiah born three centuries after Christ, whose existence was kept a secret until Hitler’s art was looted after WWII.
Twenty years after leaving the secret service, Andrew Hale rejoins in 1963 to finish his mission - bring down the Communist government before Moscow can gain control of Mt. Ararat (the last site of Noah’s Ark) and its supernatural powers.
An ancient scroll, containing a prayer that hints at heresy and a dangerous conspiracy, falls into the hands of Father Ian Pearse. He sets out to unlock its mysteries and stop a plan to destroy the Catholic Church.
Rollins, James. Map of Bones
When the bones of the three wise men are stolen, the Department of Defense’s Sigma Force is led to a medieval alchemical sect in the Catholic Church. Agent Grayson Pierce teams up with love interest Rachel Verona in Rome to stop the Dragon Court from it’s goal – Armageddon.
Television journalist Cotton Stone happens upon an archaeological dig in Iraq just before the US invasion. The chief archaeologist dies, but not before uttering a strange message to Cotton, one that seems connected to her dead twin sister. Not only that, but the dig had uncovered an artifact believed to the Holy Grail, sought by a secret society that believes it contains the DNA of Jesus.
Archaeologist Catherine Alexander discovers six papyrus scrolls written by a female leader of the early Christian Church and alluding to a Seventh Scroll containing the secret to eternal life. Convinced that these findings could undermine the foundations of the Christian church, she takes them on her dangerous action-and-romance-filled quest to find the seventh scroll.
West, Morris has written a number of Cold War era stories including The Clowns of God, in which the Pope believes he has received a message of impending apocolypse. In The Last Confession he tells the story of Giordano Bruno, a Dominican monk accused of heresy in 1600 and burned at the stake.
Biblical scholar Shulamit Shepher investigates her family’s history to try and discover the origins of a handwritten Bible volume belonging to her great-grandfather.