Arthur Prescott, an obsessive bibliophile and Holy Grail fanatic combs through centuries of history to uncover a long-lost secret about the medieval Barchester Cathedral library at the side of a young American charged with digitizing the library's manuscripts.--

The third in Susan Howatch's Church of England novels, Ultimate Prizes begins in 1942 with the world at war, as narrator and archdeacon Nevill Aysgarth finds himself falling into a hopeless obsession over Dido Tallent, beautiful celebrity, and finds himself pursuing her through a swamp of guilt and the destruction of his valued moral compass. . . .
Praise for Ultimate Prizes
“I did not want to put the book down....

During the building of a cathedral in the fictional town of Kingsbridge, the ambitions of three men merge, conflict and collide through 40 years of social and political upheaval as internal church politics affect the progress of the cathedral and the fortunes of the protagonists.

In the gentle world of one of England's beautiful old cathedral towns, crisis looms: funds are short, and the cathedral is in need of major repair. One faction of the community argues that the obvious solution is to abolish the expensive, and nowadays rather irrelevant, boys' choir. But of course, there are those who disagree: the choir school's headmaster, a conscientious scholar somewhat out of his depth with his elusive, poetical wife; the cathedral...

Hooded men invade midnight mass at the Cologne Cathedral and slaughter almost everyone present, then break open a gold sarcophagus and steal... the bones of the Three Wise Men. Grayson Pierce, top agent in the Department of Defense's covert Sigma Force, takes a team to Rome, joins up with love-interest Rachel Verona, a carabinieri corps lieutenant, and her Vatican official uncle, Vigot. It seems that the Dragon Court, a medieval alchemical cult-cell...