Serpent’s Knot: The Vilcabamba Key (Jones Files)

Rooftop escapes in Cairo. Ambushes in the Andes. A machine that sings the world apart. If you crave action and ancient mystery tied to chilling ideology, this is your next read.

Abner Winslow is a treasure hunter with a conscience—and a terrible habit of being right. Lena Petrova is the woman who must choose between country and family. Watch them collide in a Cold War thriller that keeps you guessing.

Abner Winslow is exactly the sort of man who gets shot at for curiosity’s sake. After a heist in Cairo leaves him with a singed fragment of the Amaru-Khipu—threads that hum and knots that behave like blueprints—he stumbles into a Cold War triangle of murder, espionage, and ideological vanity. The Soviets want the power; a zealot ex-Wehrmacht squad wants dominion; Abner wants to keep the thing in a museum and out of mad hands. Guess which plan goes first.

From Georgetown labs to the cloud forests of Peru, the chase is loud, dirty, and morally messy. An icy Soviet agent proposes a temporary truce; a Quechua guide keeps the group human; a Nazi commander brings fanatic math and a short fuse. When the khipu is completed, the ruins sing—not with salvation, but with a physics that unravels living things.

If you like your adventure with a dash of wry danger, blistering altitude, and a protagonist who’d rather read the knot than lead an army, this is the race you don’t want to lose.