The Labyrinth of Osiris

September 17, 2012
A grisly murder in Jerusalem lights the fuse of Sussman’s powder-keg third thriller featuring Egyptian police detective Yusuf Ezz el-Din Khalifa (after 2005’s The Last Secret of the Temple), who’s reunited with his friend and Jerusalem counterpart, Arieh Ben-Roi. When investigative journalist Rivka Kleinberg is found garroted in an Armenian cathedral in Jerusalem, Ben-Roi follows up on the leads of Kleinberg’s last story to find disparate clues involving a powerful American mining corporation, an anticapitalist vigilante group calling itself “The Nemesis Agenda,” and a mining engineer’s disappearance in Egypt more than 80 years earlier. These “threads and connections, a whole spider’s web’s worth,” only twist, however, into even more byzantine intrigues embracing both Egypt’s ancient archeological treasures and modern-day religious clashes. Sussman dexterously weaves the many subplots into a taut skein, never losing sight of his characters’ humanity and troubled lives. Readers who enjoyed his previous cross-cultural thrillers will find much here to like. Agent: Laura Susjin, the Susjin Agency.