The Inquisitor's Key

While helping to excavate a newly unearthed chamber beneath the spectacular Palace of the Popes in Avignon, France, Miranda Lovelady—protégée of Dr. Bill Brockton—makes a startling discovery: a stone chest bearing an inscription declaring it holds the bones of Jesus of Nazareth. The find could rock the Church to its very foundations, and it draws Brockton from the Body Farm to determine the truth, using modern forensic science.
But when Brockton and Miranda link the bones to the haunting image on the famous Shroud of Turin, their investigation sparks a deadly tug of war between scientists, the Vatican, and Apocalypse-obsessed fanatics—and a newly slain corpse soon appears on hallowed ground. Suddenly the search for answers to a mystery born in an ancient era has taken on a frightening urgency . . . as a crazed zealot waits in the shadows, determined to trigger the end of time.

Jefferson Bass is the writing team of Jon Jefferson and Dr. Bill Bass. Dr. Bass, a world-renowned forensic anthropologist, is the creator of the University of Tennessee's Anthropology Research Facility, widely known as the Body Farm. He is the author or coauthor of more than two hundred scientific publications, as well as a critically acclaimed memoir about his career at the Body Farm, Death's Acre. Dr. Bass is also a dedicated teacher, honored as U.S. Professor of the Year by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. Jon Jefferson is a veteran journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. His writings have been published in the New York Times, Newsweek, USA Today, and Popular Science and broadcast on National Public Radio. The coauthor of Death's Acre, he is also the writer and producer of two highly rated National Geographic documentaries about the Body Farm.