Last Secret of the Temple

by Paul Sussman

Overview

In the year 70 AD, as the Romans sacked and destroyed the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, a young Jewish boy was hidden away and chosen as the guardian of a great secret. For seventy generations this secret remained safeguarded. But in present day Israel, a Jewish radical threatens to reveal this hidden truth and use it to rend apart the fragile Middle East—and only an unlikely duo of hardened detectives of very different origins and a young, enterprising Palestinian journalist can unite to ward off disaster.

A relentless and fast-paced thriller that moves from Egypt to Jerusalem to the Sinai Desert, that spans the millennia and involves Cathar heretics, Nazi prisoners, and modern-day suicide bombers, Paul Sussman’s The Last Secret of the Temple is a thrilling, roller-coaster adventure that brilliantly examines the participants on both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Timely, important, and completely absorbing, it marks Paul Sussman as one of today’s great thriller writers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780553814057
Publisher:	Bantam Books
Publication date:	06/05/1906
Pages:	720
Product dimensions:	4.05(w) x 7.00(h) x 1.55(d)

About the Author

Paul Sussman’s two great passions are writing and archaeology. He fulfills the former by working as a freelance journalist and the latter by spending two months a year excavating in Egypt. His first novel was The Lost Army of Cambyses. He lives with his wife in London.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

For those who enjoyed his first novel, The Lost Army of Cambyses, in which ancient mysteries mesh with front-page political events, The Last Secret of the Temple won't disappoint. The same up-to-the-minute headlines figure strongly in a novel that begins with the sack of Jerusalem by the Romans in A.D. 70. Set against a background of suicide bombs and fragile peace negotiations, it marks a second outing for Yusuf Khalifa, Sussman's Egyptian police inspector…Sussman succeeds on the strength of his intelligence, empathy and sense of pace. The novel uses some stock materials—a plundered temple, a Crusader castle, a Nazi archaeologist, a lost treasure that must not fall into the wrong hands. But the story is propelled along by the strength of the protagonists, with Sussman blocking in plenty of background while neatly avoiding the pitfall of winching in large chunks of history. Khalifa, in particular, is a fine creation, a decent man struggling with his preconceptions in a world that's become a moral as well as a political hornet's nest. And just when the plot begins to look too obvious, he produces a few more narrative tricks from up his sleeve.
—The Washington Post

Ross King

The search for a hidden treasure that will be either a blessing or a curse for the state of Israel reopens wounds from the Holocaust and threatens to worsen the state of Arab-Israeli relations, if such a thing is possible. This latest entry in the blast from the mysterious biblical past sweepstakes begins with the Roman destruction of the Jewish Temple in AD 70 and the last minute spiriting away of the Temple's greatest but mysterious and unrevealed treasure. After a side trip to the Austrian Alps as the Reich is collapsing, where SS troopers are hiding a Large Heavy Box with Unrevealed Contents in a remote salt mine (could there be a connection with the Temple Treasure?), Sussman (The Lost Army of Cambyses, 2003) sets the reader down in today's wretched Middle East for what seem to be unrelated stories in Jerusalem and Cairo, plot lines that will converge and lead-yes-to the Treasure. In Egypt, Inspector Yusuf Khalifa, an honest, hardworking detective with a strong background in archaeology who is nearly the only likable character to be introduced, takes on the case of apparently murdered Dutchman Piet Jansen. Khalifa quickly learns that Jansen was not murdered but was quite possibly the culprit 15 years earlier in Khalifa's first case as a policeman. Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, attractive but ruthless Palestinian reporter Layla al-Madani has received an anonymous letter containing a sheet of medieval code that promises to put her in touch with al-Mulatham, a renegade Palestinian firebrand. While Layla follows the code to Cambridge and Languedoc (the tragic heretical Cathars pop up briefly), heartbroken Israeli police detective Arieh Ben-Roi (a suicide bomber showed up at his wedding)nurses his rage against Palestinians, chugs vodka and follows his gut until he gets the phone call from Egypt that will start tying all the plot lines together. Clunky prose swaddles a frantic but unexceptional plot. Agent: Laura Susjin/The Susjin Agency

Kirkus Reviews

“While Paul Sussman’s brilliant novel, The Last Secret of the Temple, will be compared to Dan Brown’s eight-hundred-pound gorilla, it is so much more. The mystery runs deeper, the history more accurate, the suspense drawn to a keener edge….Here is a thriller on par with the best literature out there.” –James Rollins, author of The Judas Strain

“Not just a tightly plotted, richly observed, thought-provoking thriller, but one with a soul.” –Raymond Khoury, author of The Last Templar

“A brilliant detective novel…Paul Sussman has managed the impossible: a multi-layered quest where all the characters are real and alive, and we should expect the completely unexpected.” –Katherine Neville, author of The Eight

“Another surefire winner from a gifted storyteller.” –Steve Berry, author of The Templar Legacy

“The Last Secret of the Temple won’t disappoint….Sussman succeeds on the strength of his intelligence, empathy, and sense of pace…Khalifa…is a fine creation.” –Ross King, The Washington Post

From the Publisher