The Captain's Cipher

History says Lewis and Clark mapped the West. History left out what they buried.

In 1806, on the way home from the Pacific, Captain Meriwether Lewis made a cache on the Marias River in Montana that appears in no official journal. For more than four hundred days his journals are blank. Three years later he was dead from gunshot wounds at a lonely inn in Tennessee, and historians still can't agree whether he killed himself or was murdered.

Two centuries later, Cole Tasman, a broke New Zealand skipper stuck on a frozen Montana lake, is pulling apart a rotten old boat for parts. Sealed inside the hull he finds a steamboat pilot's notebook from 1866, full of ciphers copied from "the private journal of the late Captain Lewis".

Then the man who sold him the boat turns up dead on the ice.

Now Cole is racing a historian who thinks he's a fraud, a crowd of online treasure hunters who have found his dock, and a powerful family that has been hunting the same secret since 1809 and has never once lost. The clues were written by men who navigated by river, compass and stars. Every historian has read them wrong. It takes a skipper to read them right.

From a frozen lake to the Missouri breaks, from a Virginia Masonic lodge to a Spanish king's lost letter, The Captain's Cipher is a treasure hunt with real history at its heart, a slow-burn romance, and a river that keeps its own counsel.

For readers of Clive Cussler, Steve Berry and National Treasure.