If you were to go through a checklist of what would make for a thrilling read, almost all boxes could be checked for this book. Fantastic story, great balancing of history and fiction, and well developed character- they’re all there. But something is a little of and with a book of this size that can be a problem.
Jan Weis, hotel owner and connoisseur of Egyptian archeology, is found dead near an excavation at Malgata on the west bank of the Nile and Inspector Yusuf Khalifa of the Luxor police (first seen in Sussman’s first novel, The Lost Army of Cambyses), is called in for what appears to be a routine case. As Khalifa mines for clues in the man’s mysterious life, correlations to a case Khalifa was a junior on thirteen years ago begin to appear. Under the marked reservation of his superiors, Khalifa re-opens the case of the murder of an Israeli woman that ended in the conviction of, in Khalifa’s opinion, the wrong man. He and Israeli police officer Arieh Ben-Roi find that the murder is deeply woven into the fabric of an ancient mystery of a religious artifact smuggled to a castle in France, Castelombres.
As they pull the puzzle pieces scattered across the globe together, journalist Layla al-Madani, receives an anonymous letter that asks her to contact “Al-Mulassam” (“The Veiled One”), a Palestinian extremist leader she has recently interviewed. As a reward, she will be granted information about a document, written in an old Roman alphabet that at first appears to be just gibberish. It is, instead, a complex code; a code that could lead to the discovery of something long hidden. Something very dangerous.
The problem lies in the pacing. A thriller, by its very nature, should be thrilling. This story, written with obvious passion and knowledge, is an undertaking to read. If the readers can dedicate themselves and read through to at least the middle, the plot will carry them forward.

Jennifer Jordan