I found this a deeply moving and shocking story of betrayal and its consequences. It reads just like a thriller as you race on to find out what happens next, and yet has time for wonderfully evocative descriptions of Rome and its environs.
Extract
The thread of contingency is inscrutable. Somewhere above the Dead Sea a ragtag group of students and archaeologists was at work picking over the bones of the past, kneeling in the dust and sifting fragments from the rubbish, and finding there the first hints of disaster. While somewhere in Rome a married woman and a dry and sterile priest shared something fragmentary and ill-defined: a sympathy, a sense of irony, a feeling of doubt, a sensation of discovery.
