The Temple Keep

Book Cover
The Temple Keep

Dig Into the Codes, Crypts, and an Explosive Secret That Will Forever Change History

Beneath the storied campus of one of America’s oldest universities, something impossible is hidden.

When Noah Greaves—an outsider with a gift for math and a taste for the obscure—unlocks a strange cipher buried in a Shakespearean sonnet, he stumbles into a centuries-old underground crusade where scholars, spies, mystics, and cryptographers hunt the same thing: a vault built in shadows, rumored to contain something far greater than gold.

Based on actual places and events–from colonial-era crypts to forgotten tunnels, from lost Masonic blueprints to encoded poetry, “The Temple Keep” weaves history, architecture, literature, mathematics, and physics into a gripping race to solve the ultimate riddle of human existence—one hidden in plain sight, and protected by blood.

Atmospheric, erudite, and deeply unsettling, “The Temple Keep” is a mind-bending thriller for readers who believe that some truths are written in stone—and others, in code.

The Photo Vault

The Christopher Wren Building
The Frenchman’s Map
A Bacon cipher in Shakespeare.
A Bacon cipher in Shakespeare.
Bacon's Cipher Key
Sir Francis Bacon’s Cipher Key
18th century drainage tunnel at Wren.
Unearthed Jefferson Foundations
Bruton Parish Church
Camp Peary, the CIA’s secret training facility next door to Colonial Williamsburg and The College of William and Mary.
Shakespeare’s varied signatures
The Sunken Gardens at the College
Wren, from the Sunken Gardens
Jefferson’s Plan to Extend the Wren Building
Sir Francis Bacon
The man known as William Shakespeare
Nathaniel Bacon the Elder’s Grave Marker at Bruton Parish Church
A Bacon cipher in Shakespeare.

A Mysterious Map

Visit Colonial Williamsburg and be sure to bring a copy of the mysterious piece of cartography known as “The Frenchman”s Map.” Did Thomas Jefferson himself have a hand in its design? Do the scribbles in the margins–long dismissed his historians as “graffiti”–actually involve sacred geometry that links Williamsburg to another revolutionary city? Bonus: Note the clear symbol of Freemasonry–the compass and the square–encompassing the entire old campus of The College of William and Mary.

The Frenchman’s Map

Decode the Cipher

Sir Francis Bacon developed an ingenious “bi-literal” cipher, in which “anything could be made to say anything.” Were the works of Shakespeare embedded with such code? Use Bacon’s cipher key to create a code of your own. Bonus: “The Temple Keep” has bi-literal code embedded in it. Can you break it?”

Bacon's Cipher Key
Sir Francis Bacon’s Cipher Key

About the Author

Michael Holtzman is a graduate of The College of William and Mary, and served on the Board of Advisors for the College’s Reves Center for International Studies. He served as a senior advisor in the U.S. Department of State and in the Executive Office of the President of the United States, as was chief creative strategist for The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. He is a published author of fiction and non-fiction, and a musician with the rock super-group Bad Penny.

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