The Judas Code

At 3:07 a.m., Miriam Tharakan's phone lights up with two messages from her mentor: "Come to the lab. Now. Tell no one." and "Judas delivered Judas."By the time she reaches the Hartwell Institute in Oxford, the imaging suite is full of smoke. A priceless parchment leaf is gone from its cradle, there is blood on the bench, and Aurelian Voss, the man who rescued her from obscurity, has vanished.Under the leaf's medieval hymns lies a much older Syriac text, written over and nearly erased. Miriam is one of the few scholars alive who can read it. Its claim could shake two thousand years of faith: that the disciple called Thomas, "the Twin," was exactly that. On the night of the betrayal in Gethsemane, it says, the man who stepped forward into the torchlight may not have been the one the soldiers came for.Miriam follows her mentor's trail from the Vatican archives to a tomb in Jerusalem, and then to a cliff-top villa in Italy guarded by a secret order sworn to protect the truth. But every clue is a door, and someone has been opening them for her. She will have to decide whether she is uncovering history or being used to forge it. The answer waits where her own story began, in Kerala, among the oldest Christians in the world.A gripping conspiracy thriller about faith, forgery and the question at the heart of every great mystery: who were they really?