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• More titles by Chris Kuzneski

Synopsis

No secret will keep for ever ... 

A Vatican priest is found murdered on the shores of Denmark – nailed to a cross in the shadow of Hamlet’s castle. He is the first victim in a vicious killing spree that spans the world. Each horrific murder exactly mirrors the crucifixion of Christ … Meanwhile, deep in the Roman Catacombs of Orvieto, an archaeologist uncovers an ancient scroll dating back two thousand years. The scroll, he knows, holds the key to a dark and treacherous secret that will rock the very foundations of the Church. But only if he can decipher its lost meanings – and only if he can live long enough to reveal them ...

The enemies of the truth know no law of man …

Reviews

Customer Review: 14 May 2007

Reviewer: Willem G.F. van Kempen

This masterpiece gave me sleepless nights not able to stop turning the pages. Looking forward to seeing the bonus-dvd containing his unused research.

Interview

How long have you been a writer?

Since I was old enough to hold a crayon and not try to eat it. In the fourth grade, I wrote my first book, The Monster’s Cookbook, which was filled with dozens of creatures that I’d created and what they should be fed. The school’s librarian was so impressed that she had it hardbound and placed in the library, right next to all the books I grew up reading. From that point on, I knew I wanted to be a writer. Either that or a professional athlete. I ultimately chose writing because the money is so much greater and the groupies are better looking.

Why did you choose crime fiction?

When I was growing up, my parents always read mysteries and thrillers, which means they were always lying around the house. The books, not my parents. Anyway, that’s the main reason I got started with this genre. It’s what I was exposed to as a child. And what I continue to read today.

How did you come up with the concept for Sign of the Cross?

As a student at the University of Pittsburgh, I had a class called “The Bible as Literature” where we analyzed the Bible from a literary perspective, not a theological one. We actually broke down the word choice of the writers, comparing individual passages to other religious texts, and so on. That opened my eyes to a lot of things about Christianity, both good and bad. Biblical events that I had always assumed were historical facts suddenly seemed suspicious. After that, I knew a story like Sign of the Cross was plausible. It was just a matter of how I wanted to tell it.

And England is part of that story. How did that come about?

I’ve been to England twice in my life, and on both trips I spent time in the city of Bath. There’s something about that place that I’ve always loved. On one hand it’s a charming English city, filled with wonderful parks and pubs, yet it’s known throughout the world for its Roman baths. For some reason, that dichotomy always fascinated me. I remember walking near the edge of the River Avon, just listening to the water and admiring the architecture of the surrounding buildings, while I took mental snapshots of everything around me. This was several years ago—long before I started the book—but I knew that I’d write about the city and its history someday. I just wasn’t sure how.

Eventually, things fit together like pieces to a jigsaw puzzle. I knew I wanted to explore early-Christianity and realized the Romans had a strong presence in Britain back in the day, so I figured I could combine the two, using Bath as part of the back-story. In Sign of the Cross, an English professor stumbles across a bronze cylinder while on an archeological dig near the Roman baths. Inside he finds a document written by Tiberius, who was the emperor at the time of Christ’s death, that describes the site of a great shrine that was built in the tufa underneath the modern-day city of Orvieto, Italy. The professor travels to Umbria, hoping to find this ancient tomb, but ends up finding something much more important. Of course, I’m not going to ruin the book by telling you what he found. Besides, dozens of people have been killed over the years to protect the secrets of Orvieto, and at this stage of my career I can’t afford to lose any readers.

But Orvieto is just part of the story. Your novel is divided into three separate plots that are seamlessly woven together.

I’ve always enjoyed stories like that. As a reader, you’re not quite sure where the author is taking you or how you’re going to get there, but that’s part of the fun, trying to figure out how one set of events has something to do with another. In the case of Sign of the Cross, the book opens with a violent murder on the shore of Hamlet’s castle in Denmark. This is the first of many more murders to come, all of them linked together. From there, the book goes to Orvieto where the professor is searching for the lost shrine. Finally, the spotlight shifts to a prison in Pamplona, Spain, where the two main characters are temporarily incarcerated.

Those characters, Jonathon Payne and David Jones, got their start in your first novel, The Plantation. Did you know they were going to be recurring characters?

I hoped they would be, but I didn’t know for sure until I got such a positive reaction for The Plantation. When the characters started getting fan mail—people actually wrote letters to Payne & Jones—there was no doubt in my mind that I’d bring them back. In the beginning, I was hoping to create two characters that were different from each other in a lot of ways (different races, different talents, different upbringings, etc.) yet still managed to be best friends. Like I mentioned, I knew I wanted to write a series and figured their differences would give me plenty of things to explore in future books. Unless, of course, I hit the wrong key and accidentally kill one of them off.

There are fabulous twists and turns in your novels. Do you know all of these from the beginning or do they evolve as you write?

I typically know the beginning of my story and have a vague notion of the conclusion, but all the stuff in between just happens to emerge through a combination of research, trial and error, and pure luck. Sometimes things fall into place, and when they do, I breathe a huge sigh of relief. To be honest, that’s probably one of the reasons that my readers don’t know what’s going to happen next—because I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Sometimes I think I became a writer to find out how the stories in my head actually end.

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