Christos mosaic (Blank Slate Press)

A suspicious death in Istanbul leaves one ancient scroll and clues to finding another in the hands of Drew Korchula, a 32-year-old American expat, and a Turkish dwarf named Kadir. Drew is desperate to turn everything over to the academic community, and in the process redeem himself in the eyes of his estranged wife, but Kadir is only interested in what they can get for their scroll on the black market. Not everyone wants to see the scrolls go public, however, and some will stop at nothing to protect the Catholic Church from the revelations embodied in the priceless manuscripts. An intellectual and theological thriller unraveling the mystery of a cold case more than 2,000 years old, The Christos Mosaic takes the reader through the backstreets of Istanbul and Cairo to clandestine negotiations with antiquities smugglers and soldiers of fortune, on a nautical skirmish off the coast of Alexandria, and finally to the ruins of Constantine's palace buried beneath the streets of present-day Istanbul.