Discover
The Jerusalem Code

Book 2 of 3 - The Apocrypha Trilogy
A Father's Lock. A Dying Fragment. 
A Truth They'll Stop at Nothing to Bury.
Forty-seven hours. That's how long Ava Calloway has before the relic sealed beneath Jerusalem crumbles to dust and takes a fifteen-hundred-year-old secret with it.
She's the only one who can open it. The seal answers to her bloodline, and to two keys her father hid apart before he vanished; kept separate so no single hand could ever turn them alone.
Now Ava has his journal, the code only the two of them can read, and a single partner as hunted as she is.
The trail runs fast and dark, from the tunnels beneath Jerusalem to the porticoes of Bologna to the flooded cisterns under Istanbul. Some want the fragments sealed away forever. Others want them seized and controlled. Ava stays a step ahead of them all, but the closer she comes to the truth, the more it costs to keep moving.
One wrong move, and the secret her father gave his freedom to protect is gone for good.
The history is real. The conspiracy is human. The stakes have never been more personal.
For fans of Kate Mosse, Brad Meltzer, and Deborah Harkness, the second installment of The Apocrypha Trilogy delivers a heart-pounding journey of mystery, history, and suspense.
 Now at Amazon
Also available in paperback

EXPLORE

The Characters

  • Ava Calloway - No longer following a trail someone else left. She has her father's journal, the code only the two of them can read, and forty-seven hours before the relic sealed beneath Jerusalem crumbles to dust. The seal answers to her bloodline. That makes her the only one who can open it, and the only one worth stopping.
  • Marcus Visconti - He walked away from the institution that raised him and hasn't looked back. Every lock past Jerusalem was built to refuse a single pair of hands, which means Ava cannot open one without him. Every mile widens the gap between the family he came from and the truth he's chosen to protect at her side.
  • James Calloway - Ava's father, who vanished the night he uncovered what lay sealed beneath Alexandria. Not dead. He hid two keys apart before he disappeared, so that no single hand could ever turn them alone, and the trail he left is written in a language only his daughter shares.
  • Dr. Eleanor Blackwood - A scholar with no institution and no fixed address, reaching Ava through encrypted calls and careful letters from somewhere just out of view. She knows more about the fragments — and about Ava — than she lets on, and the further the hunt goes, the harder it is to tell whether she's guiding Ava toward the truth or steering her clear of it.

The Plot

  • It begins before dawn in the Old City — disguised, moving fast, a first-century seal coming apart somewhere beneath her feet and every message on her phone saying the same thing: they're already moving.
  • In a safe house far from Jerusalem, a small leather journal turns up pushed behind the books on a shelf — Latin, margin-notes in a careful hand she's never seen, trained by the exact method her father used. Someone else has walked this road. Someone who meant to be found.
  • City after city, the same kind of figure waits at the threshold: a guardian who has protected a single door his whole life and could never open it himself. In Istanbul, one of them presses a key into her hand, points into the dark beneath the streets, and stays behind.
  • Thirty-two steps down, past a corridor sealed for centuries, a chamber lined in copper waits — built for one purpose and no other. What's kept there is what her father gave everything to protect, and what a dozen others will do anything to keep buried.

Reviews

what people say

Fantastic! Another impressive addition to the trilogy. Fast paced and thrilling from beginning to end. Again, the characters are very strong and relatable.”

deacon tom

As with the first book, as more clues are exposed, the more the mystery captures you, in this un-put-downable book. Looking forward to a big reveal in book 3.

fl

This series is just getting better. Has all the things I love, history and mystery with lots of adventure … Will be waiting for the next and the next to come.

terri

Although it’s the second book in the series, it’s the only one I have read so far and I had no trouble following the storyline.

bianca

I enjoyed this second book even more than the first. A satisfying sequel that expands the world while keeping the suspense high from start to finish

fran

I very much enjoyed the second installment of this series … I especially enjoyed the connections the characters made in each location with the past.

Acheladyn

Buy Your Copy Now!

A Father's Lock. A Dying Fragment. A Truth They'll Stop at Nothing to Bury.
 Now at Amazon
Also available in paperback

Want To Know More?

Sign up below and download the Prologue to The Alexandria Cypher — Book One of The Apocrypha Trilogy — free. See where Ava's story began.
Prologue - 
Egypt - Three Years Earlier
The discoloration was barely visible. A faint change in the limestone where the tunnel curved, the kind of mark that twenty-five years of fieldwork had trained James Calloway to see.

>