The Roman Inquiry

Rome wants a report. Cassian wants an explanation. Eleven witnesses give him something he cannot file.

Lucius Cassian Varro has spent fourteen years turning testimony into findings. His assignment in Galilee looks ordinary: collect the testimony on a carpenter from Nazareth, establish the pattern, file the report, and let the prefect decide what to do with it.

The witnesses are ordinary too. A shepherd who nearly destroyed his closest friendship over a lamb he never lost. A potter carrying a lie she told at eleven. A woodcarver whose own hands were given back to him. None of them agree on who the carpenter is. All of them describe the same man.

Then Cassian finds something wrong in his own file: a report twenty years old, sealed, opened, and sealed again, routed to him under prefect-level clearance after his assignment was already formalized. Someone in Caesarea is reading his file before he is.

By the end of the season he is keeping two records. Only one of them goes to Caesarea.

The Roman Inquiry is the first volume of The Witnesses, a literary mystery series set in first-century Galilee, for readers of Shūsaku Endō's Silence, Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, and Hilary Mantel.

Volume II, The Storm on the Lake, arrives later this year.