His voice is weathered but strong, like a sage; his guitar playing remains as vibrant and full of life as ever, picking out notes like nobody else can; his lyrics are potent, vivid, and poetic, as they have been over his colossal career. A 40-year-old schoolteacher from Ohio still reeling from the tragedies of the Great War and the influenza epidemic, Agnes has come into a modest inheritance that allows her to take the trip of a lifetime to Egypt and the Holy Land. Meanwhile, the quest for the original bible (known as the Sinai Bible) is still on, though muted through this book.

Between 1977 and 1987, former CIA operative Edward Whittemore (1933-1995) wrote the Jerusalem Quartet, a surreal historical fantasy that won many plaudits but little renown for its author. I purchased Sinai Tapestry and Jerusalem Poker in the news stand of the St George Hotel subway stop in Brooklyn Heights New York over two decades ago. Imagining they could do in a poor Christian just because the weather was cold and gray and bloody awful, not at all what it was cracked up to be in the land of milk and honey?The tone ranges from whimsical and funny to unsettling and depressing, in fact he resembles Heironymous Bosch in print when describing historical atrocities like the massacre at Smyrna or the Rape of Nanking.

New York City, 1972: A dabbler in mathematics and chess, Catherine Velis is also a computer expert for a Big Eight accounting firm. Where the plot lost me was the digressions into the extended metaphorical references to various historical villains whom have vied for control over the Middle East, but failed miserably.Maybe it's the way he manages to ground the more fantastical elements, like the beautifully tragic doomed quest of Haj Harun, eternal defender of the Holy City and thus destined to always fail and be on the losing side, because "when you fight for Jersulem you always lose". Twenty-one all-original stories, by an all-star list of contributors, will delight and astonish you in equal measure with their cunning twists and dazzling reversals. Much of the story development went into a wasted tangent that I found ponderous and revolting - not at all the mythic as emerging from the ordinary.

On the last day of December 1921, three enigmatic men -- Cairo Martyr, a blue-eyed African who controls the Middle East's supply of aphrodisiac mummy dust; O'Sullivan Beare, a former Irish patriot and. In The Murder of Tut, James Patterson and Martin Dugard chronicle their epic quest to find out what happened to the boy-king.The ultimate bet is for control of Jerusalem, Beare controlling the Christian quarter, Cairo the Muslim quarter and Szondi the Jewish quarter with the Armenian quarter going by default to the winner. And there are some fascinating ones here, from Joe the former Irish assassin, to Cairo Martyr whose teacher was a "mummy," to Munk the purveyor of "futures" (the three original players in the decade old Jerusalem poker game for ownership of Jerusalem). It seems to be under a continual siege of unknown nature, by unknown forces, and it just goes right on whistling and shouting and howling and doing all kinds of things I have no control over. Please Note: This copy is being sold merely for the dustwrapper which is in clean very good condition. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.