Bøker av Jim Throne

Doctor Oscar Sample, Professor of Early Christianity, a former NFL player, is confronted with this conundrum when a young priest arrives one evening at his office. At first, Sample scoffs at the first couple of pages, thinking that they were either purloined or fake. After closer examination, he realizes that the pages contain three languages - Greek, Medieval Latin and perhaps a version of Hebrew or Aramaic. Sample gets the priest to explain that he'd uncovered the cache at the Archbishopric in New Orleans. Sample has a photographer, a gridiron nemesis, to carefully photograph each page. He asks his graduate student to examine the copies. They appear truly ancient, perhaps first century CE.Sample recruits a well-known Jewish scholar, an expert in paper technologies and an expert in written antiquities to decide whether the documents are real. If so, what do the messages reveal?. The parchment and the inks are eighth century Celtic. The group concludes that they are probably practice pages done by monastery scribes. As the translations evolve the group discusses the source of these documents and their authorship and meaning. Are these the writings of religious members at the beginning of Christianity? Before the group can decide how to disseminate the information, one by one the members die under unusual circumstances.

Of the more than 400 barrier islands along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, few are large enough to be inhabitable. In the early 1970s, while clearing an area for a new casino and resort on a currently-uninhabited island, workers uncover a human skeleton. Slade Dollar, a detective from the mainland town of Lewiston decides it's a job for the State Crime lab. After the forensic experts remove most of the bones, Dollar finds an odd-looking shoe. When a second skeleton and then a third are unearthed, one with a bullet hole, the other buried under a collapsed barn wall, the island was declared a crime scene. Two more bodies are found as his investigation evolves. As Dollar digs into the island's history and its original recluse hog farmers, he learns that a radio station had purchased the island in the late 1930s and renamed it Paradise. Each week the station game show had awarded a week vacation on the island to each of five lucky newlywed couples. Dollar sets out to determine the names of the five couples and those of the skeletons who were on the island during a 1938 tropical storm that had devastated the islands and mainland towns. His trek involves an odd running shoe, a passionate librarian, a hermit, evidence of espionage, a New York stripper, the scion of a Sicilian weapons manufacturer, an author of mystery novels and a bacchanalia.

A tornado has visited Goldfield, destroying most of the small Midwestern town and, in particular, the farm buildings of an old reclusive artist. As search and rescue teams, along with a French art expert who appears shortly after the tornado, investigate the buildings, they find his body stuffed in a freezer.Mayor Ryan Lambert and his young workers learn from a local reporter that the old guy was the last and perhaps the greatest artist of German Expressionism, a movement that was eradicated by the Nazis in the 1930s. As the man's murder is investigated, four more bodies are uncovered at the site - models, students - each one killed in a different way.After the art recovered from the nearly destroyed artist studio is deemed original and invaluable by the first expert, a second French art expert arrives and claims the entire body of work to be forgeries. A missing Russian nurse, a gallery in Moscow, a man in drag, a top-of-the-line Mercedes, and a spate of duplicate original paintings lead to a violent confrontation amid mountains of canvases, easels, and frames in an abandoned airplane hangar...

Doctor Bartholomew Grimes is a quantum physicist hired by NSA to secure highly confidential research from the locked office of a dead third-generation theoretical physicist. He learns that the man died from a tiny hole bored completely through his skull. To recover the critical documents, he must deal with an odd collection of college officials, inept local authorities, brilliant but eccentric students, the spectre of All Hallows eve, and a mythological bear...

Teenager Joshua Blackburn played rookie baseball in a small town where he stayed in the home of a widow and her teen daughters. Years later, the daughters vanish. Decades later, he inherits the widow's bookstore. The building burns, yielding the daughters' skeletons. When the local sheriff accuses him of arson and murder, Josh searches for the real criminals. As he does, he survives many attempts on his life that claim the lives of many others.

For half a millennium, the strange writings and drawings of an elaborate codex have defied the world's greatest cryptologists. Now it and a companion codex have been stolen from Yale University. As Detective Lincoln Barnes searches for international agents who may have decoded them, those who know the documents' secrets are murdered and his life is threatened.