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Heather Terrell is the author of The Chrysalis. A lawyer with more than ten years’ experience as a litigator at two of the country’s premier law firms and for Fortune 500 companies, Terrell is a graduate of Boston College and of the Boston University School of Law. She lives in Pittsburgh with her family.
From the Hardcover edition.
Map Thief: A Novel
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$7.99
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ISBN-13:
9780345507242
- Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
- Publication date: 07/08/2019
- Sold by: Penguin Group
- Format: eBook
- Sales rank: 175,561
- File size: 636 KB
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Beijing, China, 1421: It is a momentous time for the Ming Dynasty. Honoring the completion of the Forbidden City, a fleet of unprecedented size sets sail under Admiral Zheng He. Zheng’s mission is to chart the globe, trading for riches and bringing glory to China’s emperor. Among the crew is the talented cartographer and navigator Ma Zhi, whose work will lead to the first true map of the world–but whose accomplishment will vanish when the fleet returns to a very different China than the one it left.
Lisbon, Portugal, 1496: At the height of Portugal’s maritime domination during the Age of Discovery, the legendary explorer Vasco da Gama embarks on a quest to find a sea route to India. On board is navigator Antonio Coehlo, who guards Portugal’s most secret treasure: a map that already shows the way.
New York, present day: Mara Coyne’s new client has left her uneasy. Republican kingmaker Richard Tobias has hired her, he says, because of her skill in recovering stolen art and advocating for the rightful owners, but Mara senses that he is not telling her everything. Tobias reveals that a centuries-old map was stolen from an archaeological dig he is sponsoring in China, and he wants her to get it back. But as Mara begins her investigation, she uncovers the shocking truth: The map is more valuable than anyone has ever imagined, and her client’s motives are more sinister than she suspected.
Weaving rich historical detail and astounding fact into a fast-paced suspense-fiction ride, The Map Thief is an incredible entrée to the murky underworld of stolen artifacts and the thieves and traders who broker them. From Hong Kong to the Italian countryside, from Lisbon to the remote reaches of Communist China, and literally around the world on the ships of fifteenth-century explorers, Heather Terrell takes readers on a globe-trotting adventure of epic proportions.
From the Hardcover edition.
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Publishers Weekly
Attorney Terrell follows The Chrysalis with an uneven sequel that reprises art-sleuth heroine Mara Coyne and spans six centuries and five continents. Coyne, who specializes in recovering art "with a controversial past," is hired by "legendary conservative kingmaker" Richard Tobias to find a rare Chinese map that has been stolen from an archeological dig. Dating from an expedition of Admiral Zheng He to circumnavigate the earth, it is the "first map in history to accurately show the entire world" and was smuggled into Europe after an isolationist emperor ordered all accounts of the expedition destroyed. The map found its way to Portugal, where explorer Vasco da Gama used it to "discover" a sea route to India. There are lots of people hoping to suppress the existence of such a map, and Mara and archeologist Ben Coleman play a potentially deadly game of cat-and-mouse against powerful and sinister forces as they try to locate it. The imaginative narrative shifts among Zheng's expedition, da Gama's historic voyage and Coyne's investigation, but unfortunately, Terrell slows the action with superfluous characters, awkward dialogue and languid prose. (July)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Reviews
Solving the theft of a recently unearthed, pre-Columbian, Chinese map of the world calls for the highly specialized skills of a Manhattan lawyer and art historian. The map, briefly studied before its disappearance, was a stunner. Ben Coleman, archaeologist on the dig near Xi'an where an interesting mummy was also discovered, saw enough to know that if the fabulously valuable scroll's suspected antiquity can be verified, China will have bragging rights as discoverer of sea routes long claimed by Portugal. Ben's financial backer Richard Tobias, a snooty archconservative political figure, has the megabucks at hand to engage Mara Coyne to recover the map. Mara is a lawyer who has carved out a niche for herself putting art objects back where they belong. Terrell (The Chrysalis, 2007) weaves Mara's voyage of discovery into the history of Ma Zhi, cartographer to the legendary eunuch admiral Zheng He, and that of Portuguese sailor Antonio Coelho, an officer on Vasco da Gama's voyage to India, packing hefty loads of history into her slightly rickety thriller framework. Moving quickly to identify the thief before the treasure makes it into the hands of some unscrupulous collector, Mara jets off to China where she uses her professional contacts to come up with the name of the criminal boss near Xi'an who can set her on the trail. Teaming up with the hunky Ben, Mara gets a lead that takes her first to Italy and then to Lisbon, where she has been told that a Senhor Dias is the man most likely to have gotten his hands on the map. There is much snooping around Portugal, and much of the snooping has more than a whiff of Nancy Drew, with hidden rooms and secret clues and a scary Chinese guy following themeverywhere. The historical threads are less swoony, although mapmaker Zhi, whose voluntary castration made him eligible for Imperial service, does pine for his ladylove. Tepid thrills, but interesting history and geography.