THE NINTH ARCH

Seven weeks ago, he heard Gods name. He has not been able to say it since.

John Harlan is a widowed architect, a lifelong Baptist, and a Scottish Rite Mason whose faith went quiet the night his wife died. During the Thirteenth Degree at his Valleys fall reunion, the stage lights go dark, and John is pulled into a cave of nine chambers cut deep under the earth. In the last chamber, a white stone stands on a pillar, carved with three ancient letters. A voice speaks a word over him three times. His jaw locks. He cannot say it back.

When the lights come up, he is in his seat in row M with red cave clay on his shoes.

The clay is real. So is the stone. A priest carried it out of the burning temple in AD 70. A Jewish family guarded it through the massacres of 1096 and across an ocean. In 1866, a merchant and a Methodist preacher sealed it inside a Missouri River bluff with fifty pounds of black powder, and only one of them walked away.

Now a soft-spoken Kansas City bookseller wants it. He has the preachers diary, a lease on the bluff, and a recording of Johns voice. He has a plan for the Day of Atonement, the one night of the year the Name was ever spoken aloud. And he has Johns estranged brother.

Moving between ancient Jerusalem, medieval Mainz, Civil War Missouri, and the present day, The Ninth Arch is a fact-based suspense novel about grief and faith, about secrets and the words we have no right to speak. It asks whether a man must possess Gods hidden name to be near Him and what he will give up to find out.

For readers of biblical history, Masonic legend, and Christian suspense who want a story with real facts beneath it and a real question at its heart.