The Last Ember

“I am no book larnt man, but there is few who can beat me swapping horses or guessing the weight of a bar. I have come here because my people voted for me, knowing I was a honest man and could make as good whisky and apple brandy at my still as any man.”

5/24/13

- Jacob Groom, Missouri state legislator of the 1820s

A Quote A Day (to keep the reader wondering):

“The musculature of the back in motion is a ballet. This piece of fabric should be set to music and this tincan is a poem of ingenuity. Everything changes proportion, angle, appearance. Everything moves away, comes closer, mounts up, fails, laughs, states its position, and is enraged. Products from the five parts of the world show up in the same dish, on the same dress.”

5/23/13

- Blaise Cendrars, Profound Today (1917)

ThrillerFest 2013:

Keep an eye out for this year’s itinerary at ThrillerFest ‘13, where all things thriller come to mingle in NYC.

www.thrillerfest.com

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

Old King Richard III Makes The News Again

Last August the DNA within the bones found beneath a layer of concrete in an England parking lot confirmed that the former King was laid to rest there once upon a time. Thing is, no one has agreed upon anything since. He was clearly buried with great haste and no ceremony, having been crammed into an uneven hole without a coffin or tokens for the afterlife. The man died on a battlefield. Perhaps the battle was happening still, and the urgency of ceremonial burial is likely outweighed by the urgency of getting the hell out of there if you’re on the losing team and are still somehow whole.

There again, there may be proof that the King’s hands were bound by rope in the pit, in which case pomp was even more – entirely! – out of the question . . .

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