The Patriot Threat: Cotton Malone

Audie Award, Thriller/Suspense, 2016

This program contains two versions of The Patriot Threat - one is the complete unabridged text, and the other is the writer's cut, which includes Steve Berry's behind-the-scenes commentary at the ends of some of the chapters. If you'd like to listen to the Patriot Threat WITHOUT Steve Berry's comments, just play the program from the beginning. To listen to the writer's cut version of The Patriot Threat WITH Steve Berry's commentary, start with Download Part 3 or Chapter 74.

In an innovative new approach, Macmillan Audio and Steve Berry have produced an expanded, annotated writer's cut audiobook edition of The Patriot Threat.

The 16th Amendment to the Constitution legalized federal income tax, but what if there were problems with the 1913 ratification of that amendment? Secrets that call in to question decades of tax collecting. There is a surprising truth to this possibility-a truth wholly entertained by Steve Berry, a top-ten New York Times best-selling writer, in his new thriller, The Patriot Threat.

His protagonist, Cotton Malone, once a member of an elite intelligence division within the Justice Department known as the Magellan Billet, is now retired. But when his former boss, Stephanie Nelle, asks him to track a rogue North Korean who may have acquired some top secret Treasury Department files - the kind that could force the United States to its knees - Malone is vaulted into a harrowing 24-hour chase that begins on the water in Venice and ends in the remote highlands of Croatia.

With appearances by Franklin Roosevelt, Andrew Mellon, and a curious painting that still hangs in the National Gallery of Art, Steve Berry's trademark mix of history and suspense is 90 percent fact and 10 percent exciting speculation, a provocative thriller that poses a dangerous question: What if the federal income tax is illegal?