Cover image of "The Map Thief," a historical page-turner

Mara Coyne is a non-practicing lawyer who specializes in recovering stolen art. Her firm consists of her business partner, a former director of the FBI Art Crime Unit we know only as Joe, and a handful of art historians and technical support staff. But their reputation is global. So it’s no surprise when Richard Tobias, an American billionaire art collector and Republican kingmaker. turns to her to recover an ancient map lost from an archaeological dig in China. The assignment leads Mara to team up on a global quest to find the map. The archaeologist who discovered it outside Xian insists on going with her. But their frantic, intercontinental travels form just one of three timelines in a complex story that weaves together the 15th-century Chinese and Portuguese voyages of discovery with Mara’s quest. Heather Terrell’s historical page-turner, The Map Thief, is a triumph of the storyteller’s art.

The historical background to the novel

At the dawn of the 21st century, a British writer named Gavin Menzies published a book entitled 1421: The Year China Discovered America. It caused a furor but historians almost universally rejected the thesis. There was no existing physical or documentary evidence to support the claim. But Menzies’s book did bring to a wider audience the facts about a series of massive expeditions undertaken early in the 15th century by a Chinese admiral named Zheng He (1371-1433). Zheng was a Muslim and a eunuch who served in the court of the Ming Emperor known as Yongle.

In the first of his expeditions in 1405, Zheng led an armada of 62 ships and 27,800 men. It was a massive force an order of magnitude larger than anything Europeans sent across the ocean a few years later. But the six succeeding Chinese fleets from 1408 to 1433 were much larger still. And they roamed throughout the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean as far as the east coast of Africa. However, their success in establishing trade relations with nations throughout the region came to naught when Emperor Yongle was deposed. His successor ordered the ships burned and all contact with the outside world ceased upon pain of death. China remained closed to outsiders for centuries to come.

The Map Thief by Heather Terrell (2025) 336 pages ★★★★★

Map depicting the voyages of Admiral Zheng He, chronicled in this historical page-turner
No historical evidence exists to confirm Admiral Zheng He’s visit to North America. His seven voyages focused on Asia, the Middle East, and the east coast of Africa. Image: Cambridge University Press – DiploFoundation

China’s voyages of discovery overlapped with Portugal’s

Zheng He’s first voyage began in 1405. Nearly 20 years later, Portugal’s Prince Henry the Navigator (1394-1460) dispatched the first of numerous expeditions down the west coast of Africa in search of a new trade route to India. But it was not until 1498, nearly 40 years after Prince Henry’s death, that Vasco da Gama (1460-1524) reached Calicut on the southwest coast of India. Meanwhile, China’s gargantuan fleets had long since been disbanded.

In The Map Thief, we follow a Muslim eunuch mapmaker named Zhi on Admiral Zheng’s expeditions. The young man rises to the post of chief mapmaker for the fleet and is the author of the map stolen centuries later in China. Interspersed with passages about his and Mara Coyne’s travels, we also follow the story of a Portuguese mapmaker who accompanies Vasco da Gama on his fateful first voyage around the Cape of Good Hope.

As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that public disclosure of the stolen map will alter the way world history is written. The stakes are geopolitical in scope.

Of course, all three threads of Terrell’s historical page-turner converge in an explosive climax. And there are many surprises along the way.

About the author

Photo of Heather Terrell, author of this historical page-turner
Heather Terrell. Image: Soho Press

Attorney and author Heather Terrell has written some of her 19 historical novels under the pen name Marie Benedict. She studied art history at Boston College and earned a law degree from Boston University’s School of Law. She worked as a litigator for 10 years in New York City.

Terrell was born in 1968 and attended high school in Pittsburgh. She lives there now with her husband and their two children.

I’ve reviewed four of the author’s other novels under the name Marie Benedict. They’re all excellent.

For similarly engaging novels, see:

And you can always find the most popular of my 2,300 reviews, and the most recent ones, on the Home Page.