ZADOK'S TREASURE
By: Margot Arnold
Foul Play Press, Woodstock, VT
1989 (pb)
Last month I reviewed something of a stinker entitled
The Lost Testament, by Alan Gold.
Gold’s book is part of a sub-genre of fiction –usually thriller
or mystery—dealing with the “what if” of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
What if new scrolls were discovered or translations completed that
shed new light on the life of Christ.
Gold took this premise and turned out a heavy-handed and fairly
unsubtle potboiler. Margot
Arnold, in another Penny Spring and Sir Toby Glendower mystery, handles
the premise deftly and with great wit and cunning.
Those of you who may have read an earlier review of an earlier
Penny and Toby mystery (April, 2002) know that I’m not exactly
dispassionate about this series—I’ve loved it since first discovering
some ten years ago and still enjoy re-reading these little gems.
Zadok’s Treasure finds Sir Toby hauling
Penny off to Israel to search for an old friend and archaeological
colleague, Bill Pierson, who has disappeared from his dig site in the
Negev Desert. This search is
undertaken at the urging of Pierson’s possible widow, Valerie, who seems
equally interested in finding her husband and checking out the
details of the large life insurance policy he took out on himself just
before leaving on expedition. Pierson,
whose career in archaeology has been somewhat lackluster up to this point
–he is apparently a very fine practitioner of archaeology but has thus
far lacked the “Big Discovery” that will establish him in the pantheon
of premiere archaeologists—is hunting for the fabled treasure of Zadok,
high priest to Solomon, which is rumored in lore and legend to be hidden
somewhere in the vicinity of Qumran and the Dead Sea.
Against a backdrop of Israeli-Palestinian political
intrigue and terror, Toby searches out the stark wastelands of the Negev
and finally finds the body of his old colleague, killed by gunshot but not
before he has been brutally tortured and mutilated.
But here the mystery takes a seeming turn away from the quest for
Zadok’s treasure to the discovery of a remnant of scroll vellum that is
apparently part of a census document of an Essene community.
Included in this census is a Judas of Cario (Iscariot); Joseph,
resident of Arimathea; and “Jesus Filius Josephus (Jesus son of Joseph),
resident of Nazareth.
Margot Arnold takes the reader on a journey
through a thicket of plot twists and turns, dead ends and red herrings
before the mystery of Bill Pierson’s murder is solved, but it’s an
entertaining trip. The
complex plot is made all the more enjoyable by the creation of believable
and complex characters, both good and bad.
And central to this wonderful series is the relationship between
Penny and Toby, the aging Scully and Mulder of archaeological fiction!
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