The Jericho Manuscript

Doyle (The Assassination of Mary Magdalene) puts his knowledge of the Gospels to good use in this intriguing Sherlock Holmes pastiche. In 1901, Watson’s friend and former war comrade, the Rev. David Adams, asks for his help in getting Holmes to go to the scene of a suspicious death. The victim is Canon Alfred Lilly, a friend of Adams’s, who was found in his study with a fatal knife wound in his neck. On Lilly’s desk is a scrap of paper with a partial passage from the Gospel of Mark about Jesus’s journey to Jericho. Holmes quickly proves that Lilly didn’t take his own life, as the police suspect, and develops a theory that his murder was related to his translation of an ancient manuscript preserved in a Paris church. The mystery deepens when Holmes ascertains that the fragment Lilly had composed varies from the accepted text of the Gospel of Mark and includes details about what happened in Jericho that had been kept secret for centuries. The investigative trail leads to another murder and more shocking discoveries that call Church doctrine into question. Doyle seamlessly combines a sturdy understanding of Holmes’s specific skill set with the giddy puzzle-solving of a Dan Brown thriller. It’s great fun. (Self-published)