Julian's Shadow — Bill Hughes

For the antiquities professor, life s highway has been a cone-cluttered construction project. Julian is blindsided by yet another cone when he is drawn into the homicide investigation of his best friend, the Reverend Cooper Saltonstall. In the process he is forced to reevaluate all the previously conceived truths of his life.

Julian finds Cooper s personal Bible. Marked in the margins, in red ink, is a single word: Amphilochus. The rubric leads him on the quest for an ancient papyrus originally discovered in an Alexander the Great treasure trove by U.S. Special Forces while foraging through caves in the Hindu Kush mountain range in Afghanistan. Following an obscure set of clues left by Cooper, Julian and Livy, his former lover, are on their own to find the ancient document. They elude their pursuers only to become buried in the catacombs of Boston s Trinity Church.

It is September 11, 2001. In the shadow cast by the day, Julian contemplates the loathsome and absurd cruelties perpetrated by humans upon other humans in his circumstance and in the World Trade Center simply in the name of two-thousand-year-old scripture. As the magnitude of the World Trade Center attack filters through the airwaves, Julian asks himself, What if the scriptures are wrong? Uncertainty tears at him. Should he keep the text hidden? Or should he expose it to the world in order to bring scrutiny upon all scripture with possible calamitous repercussions that could wreak havoc on Western Civilization?