"What a wonderful story! Author Sarah Wisseman takes us on a journey with archaeologist Lisa Donahue, as she arrives in Jerusalem to arrange for artifacts to be loaned to her home museum in Philadelphia. Her mission becomes complicated almost immediately by the discovery of a small piece of papyrus stuck to the inside of one of the jars she is examining. Meeting up with old friend and ex-lover Greg Manzur and his friends Salima and Farid, they decipher some of the ancient text. It is possible that the papyrus is part of the Deborah Codex – books written by one of the twelve female apostles of Jesus. Where the rest of the documents are is anyone’s guess.
Other people are also interested in the rest of the codex. Some want to sell it to the highest bidder. But there is another group at work, people who would destroy the codex, to keep its supposedly heretic teachings from ever seeing the light of day. It’s a race against time and their opponents. Lisa and her friends take their very lives in their hands – for knowledge and to make sure the Dead Sea Codex is found and kept safe.
I enjoyed this book immensely. Lisa Donahue is a wonderful character, three dimensional – her job, her duty and her left-over feelings for Greg make her jump off the page. It was obvious to me, even before reading her biography, that the author had been to Israel. Her descriptions of the land, Jerusalem and its surrounding landmarks and the people transported me to the Middle East. Intrigue, romance, and the quick pace of this novel made it easy to read and hard to stop..."