The Last Testament

<p>From the Number One bestselling author of The Righteous Men comes this staggering religious conspiracy thriller. The Last Testament: It was written. It was lost. It will save us all.</p> <p>April 2003: as the Baghdad Museum of Antiquities is looted a teenage Iraqi boy finds an ancient clay tablet in a long-forgotten vault. He takes it and runs off into the night …</p> <p>Several years later at a peace rally in Jerusalem the Israeli prime minister is about to sign a historic deal with the Palestinians. A man approaches from the crowd and seems to reach for a gun – bodyguards shoot him dead. But in his hand was a note one he wanted to hand to the prime minister.</p> <p>The shooting sparks a series of tit-for-tat killings which could derail the peace accord. Washington sends for trouble-shooter and peace negotiator Maggie Costello after she thought she had quit the job for good. She follows a trail that takes her from Jewish settlements on the West Bank to Palestinian refugee camps where she discovers the latest deaths are not random but have a distinct pattern. All the dead men are archaeologists and historians – those who know the buried secrets of the ancient past.</p> <p>Menaced by fanatics and violent extremists on all sides Costello is soon plunged into high-stakes international politics the worldwide underground trade in stolen antiquities and a last unsolved riddle of the Bible.</p>