For fans of Dan Brown, a debut contemporary thriller about a young lawyer thrust into a deadly search for an ancient secret—one that has the power to steer the course of destiny.
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from The Book of Judges by Gary Fields, which is out now.
A beloved judge is murdered. His virus-infected laptop holds an ancient secret. Young lawyer Joshua Sutton, together with doctoral candidate Samantha Bollinger and tech wizard Mark Roth, are thrust into a deadly three-day quest for answers—a quest that leads them across millennia.
As Mark extracts clues from the computer, Josh and Sammi are chased around Florida by the hulking murderer and others who desperately want the laptop.
Josh and Sammi realize they’ve both been haunted by dreams about historical judges. In Mongol-ruled China, Imperial Rome, Byzantium, post-Renaissance Venice, Henry VIII’s England, and Charlemagne’s Frankish kingdom, judges heroically seek justice in life-and-death cases that come to define human rights. As they do, they are exposed to a startling secret.
Josh, Sammi, and Mark end up in a pulse-pounding race to New York City to stop the murder of another judge, one who could potentially save humanity.
PROLOGUE: YIN
1260—Beijing
Huang Tse Abdonchai stumbled up the mountainside trail, panting hard, lunging ahead, frantic. For years, he’d awoken each morning all but certain he would not see the next.
Today he was sure.
As he strained against the steep path ascending the Taihang Mountains just west of the city, a thousand voices in his head screamed over one another; a field of banners raced in a blur inside his eyes.
“Softer! Slower!” he begged, desperate to understand their commands. He shook himself, pushing harder. The thousand voices fell to a whisper, replaced by his quickening pulse pounding in his ears, a drum call to the blood-bittering wind. And then, ever so faint, he picked up the sounds of others . . . approaching.
They’d come for The Words!
Ten years before, a band of Turkish nomads, the dreaded Mongol “warriors of hell,” had thundered across the land on horseback. As each archer, at full gallop, launched sixty arrows with deadly precision, local militias had toppled like dominoes. Fortresses had crumbled before the invaders’ catapults and battering rams. The Mongols had needed no help to conquer his beloved Song dynasty.
Ruling, however, was another matter.
And so, Huang Tse, a former local administrator, had been appointed by the regional Mongol overseer as yin, the supreme magistrate for the entire province—though tightly tethered to his new masters’ leash. Year upon year, he’d imposed their savage edicts—until The Words had appeared.
He’d first encountered The Words in a matter of life and death, with the fate of two young lovers placed in his hands. A Chinese man had dared to marry a “Mansi”—an intercaste union forbidden by Mongol law. Conviction would have ensured executions for both bride and groom. Perhaps Huang Tse had tired of meting out death; perhaps it was the couple’s tender ages. At the close of testimony, he’d rushed to his private library—a treasured remnant from the Song dynasty—and wrestled with the matter deep into the night. As he’d traced a weary finger over a series of symbols on a page of a Chinese legal codex, its supple Xuan paper quivered, and a language character seemed to lift into the air.
木
The symbol for a tree.
He’d shaken his head, but then, from the withered goat-kid-skin parchment of a purple-bound text of Roman laws, a Latin word appeared to rise.
anima
The word for soul.
Was this a spell, he’d wondered, conjured from a shaman’s drum dance? As these apparitions swayed before his eyes, suddenly from all corners of the room symbols and letters flew in to join them, forming what surely must have been phrases and sentences. But before he could dissect any meaning, the mass had split into columns and swirled as whirlwinds.
As the letters and symbols had billowed throughout the chamber, it seemed a hundred voices were screaming in his head—their tones instructing, urging, demanding, but their languages and words unclear. Frightened that he’d slipped past the point of reason, he’d closed his eyes, clenched the edge of his desk, and prayed to be released from the spell. When he’d opened his eyes, the voices were gone, but a message seemed to hang in the air before him:
AS each soul is a SEED PLANTED
by the gods, SHALL WE NOT embrace
THE forest of mismatched trees?
When he’d reached out to touch those words, he’d realized they were not in the air at all, but inside his eyes. As the message faded to mist, his mind returned with heightened clarity to the legal issues he’d researched. And a simple miracle was revealed: the Mongol edict had failed to specify a penalty.
The next day, with vigor belying a sleepless night, he’d ruled that the law merely voided the intercaste marriage. The young couple was admonished to leave the territory before the regional overseer could amend the edict.
The Words, as he’d come to call them, had returned innumerable times over the ensuing years, often to aid in his legal decisions, but once, oddly, to guide his choice of horse. Shortly after The Words’ first appearance, his steed had gone lame. As he was about to purchase a black mare, The Words again seized his thoughts. Their message, strange as it seemed, was that he could dispense their wisdom only from a white mount. What mattered the hue of his horse, he wondered. Yet, afraid not to heed this powerful force, he’d followed its command. Thereafter, whenever he’d ridden into a village in need of justice, the villagers would point to his glorious white stallion and proclaim “the yin has arrived!”
But the wonder of The Words, as the years proceeded, had become a two-pronged curse. Their powerful projections had grown so great his mind could scarcely bear them; it was as if the blazing sun of enlightenment would set his inner eye on fire, bringing searing pain inside his head and delusions that lingered ever longer, leaving him begging for relief. The second prong of the curse was the Mongols. He’d come to believe they’d learned of his secret and its powers. They would surely come for The Words, or his life.
And now, it seemed, time was collapsing in on Huang Tse Abdonchai. With the shadowy fingers of nightfall tightening their grasp on the mountains, the voices, the banners, came roaring back, as unforgiving as ever. He trembled from the force of The Words.
The trees rustled. A quiver of arrows? Was it the Mongols? Or was this all in his mind?
A beam of moonlight shot down through a crack in the charcoal sky, illuminating the path ahead. Huang Tse lurched to a halt in the frigid night air; he was one stride from the cliff. He slid forward and peered down into the endless, welcoming black. Were those footsteps he heard behind him?
The ground swayed and his mind surrendered. He could no longer see past the fire within, could no longer be sure of anything. The voices raged in unyielding fury—The Words that had led him to untold miracles and driven him to madness.
Suddenly his body heaved forward, off the edge of the cliff.
Had he slipped? Or was that a hand he felt nudge him? Looking up for his killer, he saw only the unreadable, swirling whirlwinds of The Words, ablaze in fireworks across the sky.
As he plummeted into the dark, terror and relief met at the center of Huang Tse Abdonchai. He could no longer live with this dance of power and pain.
The Words were too strong.
