4 stars

Our story starts in 1355 in Venice. A man is trying to get a mysterious chest aboard a ship when he discovers the captain has been murdered. He is being chased, so he tips the chest into the water and commits suicide.

When Venice is undergoing a facelift due to the sinking of the city, the chest is discovered. This brings a secret society to the fore to take possession of the chest. Supposedly the chest belonged to Marco Polo who as we know, said that he didn’t tell all in his memoirs. This secret society is going all out to obtain possession of the chest and its contents.

Dr. Eleanor “Ellie” Griffin is an archeologist currently in Iraq doing research in the Iraq National Museum when a mission goes badly wrong. She barely gets away with a box that she discovered in a tomb. After returning home, she teams up with a graduate student to follow the clues offered in the box.

This book is well written and plotted. It is both exciting and suspenseful. It reads smoothly. This is my first Chad Brecher book, but it won’t be my last if this one is anything to go by. I really enjoyed it.

I want to thank Netgalley and Deeds Publishing for forwarding to me a copy of this great book to read.

Venice is rapidly sinking and as engineers struggle to find a way to save the city, they find a metal box, last seen in 1355, beneath the waters of the lagoon. The box is believed to have belonged to the explorer Marco Polo, and one group of people, who have been looking for the box and its contents for hundreds of years will do anything to posses it. They believe that Marco Polo did not divulge all that he saw in the East. Meanwhile, biblical archaeologist Ellie Griffin is trying to save looted museum treasures in Iraq when she also encounters a strange box . She teams up with grad student Alex Stone to try yo find out what the two boxes man, even as a shadowy group begins a search for the most sought after treasure in history