In Michael Parker's The Third Secret, the title refers to the third secret of Fatima, the contents of which were locked away in the Vatican vaults shortly after being presented to the Pope. It's not the kind of thing you want to lose, really. That's why a well-meaning cardinal took the document and secretly replaced it in 1941, after learning that the Pope planned to ship it out along with a wealth of Vatican gold to World War II-neutral Portugal by way of the Sahara. As it happened, the cardinal's fears were more than justified, as the shipment disappeared somewhere in the desert.

In the wake of this misfortune, the cardinal put the original prophecy back in the Secret Archives, claiming that a member of the Galliano Mafia family had returned it to him. That's all well and good, of course, but there's still a problem -- the fake Third Secret is still out there somewhere, and its discovery would bring a world of discredit to the Vatican if it were ever to be found.

Two decades later, one of the gold bars turns up, setting off a race to find the rest of the treasure by a myriad of groups who have no idea that something even more valuable than a truckload of gold is involved. On the one hand, there's the Vatican, which naturally wants all of its gold back. Then there's the ex-British Army captain who led the attack on the convoy in the desert and stashed the gold away inside a mountain. Apart from Captain Miles Roselli, only one other person knows where the treasure is hidden -- and he doesn't know that he knows, having lost all memory of his life before he was rescued from imminent death by native Tuaregs crossing the desert.

Then you have the Galliano family getting involved because neither Roselli nor the Vatican has the resources to sneak a fortune in gold out of the nation of Chad. Throw in Roselli's daughter and a half-brother she never knew, as well as the French Foreign Legion, and you've got yourself quite a story.

Parker works all of these individuals and groups together beautifully as they all converge on the lost shipment. While they are all pursuing the same object, their goals are vastly different. Even supposed allies work at cross-purposes to one another in the pursuit of greed and -- should the fake Third Prophecy note fall into the wrong hands -- the ultimate bargaining chip to use against the vast power of the Vatican itself.

From the horrors of war to the cloistered inner sanctum of the Vatican to a claustrophobic journey underneath the sands of the unforgiving Sahara desert, Parker deftly guides this action-packed story to a conclusion that doesn't disappoint. With strong characters and plenty of intrigue along the way, The Third Secret makes for very entertaining reading.