The Last Ember

paper-back now available

The paper-back edition is on the shelves! Buy your copy now.

about the novel

From the labyrinth beneath the Colosseum to the Biblical-era tunnels of Jerusalem, The Last Ember is a gripping, thought-provoking thriller set in the deadly world of illicit antiquity excavation and ancient intrigue. ”A terrific achievement.” –The Providence Journal

An Italian antiquities squad discovers a woman’s preserved corpse inside an ancient column. Pages torn from priceless manuscripts litter the floor of an abandoned warehouse. An illegal excavation burrows beneath Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock, ground sacred to three religions.

Jonathan Marcus, a young American lawyer and a former doctoral student in classics, has become a sought-after commodity among less-scrupulous antiquities dealers. But when he is summoned to Rome to examine a client’s fragment of an ancient stone map, he stumbles across a startling secret.  The discovery reveals not only an ancient intelligence operation to protect an artifact hidden for 2000 years, but also a ruthless modern plot to destroy all trace of it by a mysterious radical bent on erasing all remnants of Jewish and Christian presence from the Temple Mount.

With a cutting-edge plot as intricately layered as the ancient sites it explores, The Last Ember is a riveting tale spanning the high-stakes worlds of archaeology, politics, and terrorism, in its portrayal of the modern struggle to define — and redefine– history itself.

video

Check out this raw research footage from the writing of The Last Ember. Hang on tight…



Hear about the inspiration for the novel from the real life story behind it all…

audio excerpt

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in the news

The U.S. Congress has recently introduced a bill to stop illegal excavations beneath the Temple Mount, following The Last Ember’s theme confronting historical revisionism.  See the Temple Mount Preservation Act, H.R. 756 110th Cong., 1st Sess. (2007).

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The Last Ember

from the blog

Black Death

Remember the Black Death? The disease that killed at least a third of Europe and set in motion the social and economic changes that eventually ended the Middle Ages?

Turns out it’s still around.

The Black Death hit Europe and other parts of the world every century or so after its first appearance; it even hit India in the early twentieth century. But it has gotten less and less virulent over the centuries. Maybe because it’s gotten weaker, maybe because it mutated, maybe because most people now have resistance to it. But this study shows strong evidence that the current bubonic plague is indeed the same one that devastated the medieval world.

That’s right – the Black Death is still out there.

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