Internationally bestselling author Julia Navarro riveted readers around the world with her provocative novel The Brotherhood of the Holy Shroud . Now she goes even further, in this electrifying thriller about a biblical discovery in the Iraqi desert - and a deadly struggle on the eve of war to unearth a truth that's to be told. In St. Peter's Basilica, a man sits in a confessional asking forgiveness for a murder he's about to commit. And a young priest begins a desperate journey to stop him. It's the beginning of a ruthless race to find a rumored cache of sacred texts that could be one of the most explosive discoveries of all time. For as Clara Tannenberg and a team of renegade archaeologists journey deep into an Iraq on the brink of war, another far more sinister group is determined to get there first. Sweeping from the time of the biblical patriarchs to the front lines of the Iraqi conflict, from the horrors of Nazi Germany to the back rooms of Washington, D.C., The Bible of Clay is a novel of unrelenting, thought-provoking, and all-too-plausible suspense.