The Inquisitor’s Key

Dr. Bill Brockton too often acts like a cookie-cutter action hero in the pseudonymous Bass’s seventh novel featuring the Tennessee bone expert (after 2011’s The Bone Yard), an awkward blend of a conspiratorial religious thriller and a forensic procedural. Brockton drops his work on a dead undercover DEA agent to rush to France after hearing that his assistant and budding love interest, Miranda Lovelady, is about to be operated on. To his surprise, and to the detriment of some plausibility, he learns on arrival that the message was a hoax to bring him to Europe to tackle the mother of all forensic anthropological exams—determining whether a skeleton is, in fact, that of Jesus Christ himself. While Brockton’s exam and his related analysis of the evidence concerning the provenance of the Shroud of Turin fascinate, a mélange of assassination attempts and hostage-taking distracts from the science. Bass is the writing team of Dr. Bill Bass, a forensic anthropologist, and journalist Jon Jefferson. Agent: Giles Anderson, Anderson Literary Agency. (May)