Damascus Gate

Jerusalem: where earth meets heaven, home to seekers and heretics, hustlers and madmen, dreamers and the faithful of every persuasion. In this holiest and most fractious city, where religion and politics are inextricably bound, a plot unfolds to bomb the sacred Temple Mount. Robert Stone's exhilarating Damascus Gate lays bare the searing tensions and desperate hopes of those who dare to seek redemption - at any cost. Christopher Lucas, an expatriate American journalist, skeptical and searching, stumbles upon the Temple Mount plot while on assignment to investigate religious fanatics. Unwittingly entangled in the bombing plan is another American, Sonia Barnes, a Sufi convert and nightclub singer, who is drawn with Lucas into the dangerous intrigues surrounding the Old City. They encounter Adam De Kuff, an unstable Jewish guru; Raziel Melker, a strung-out Kabbalist who foists De Kuff into the role of messiah; and Jan Zimmer, a soldier of fortune routinely at the center of the world's flashpoints. A violent confrontation in the Gaza Strip, a race through riot-filled streets, a cat-and- mouse game in an underground maze - as Lucas follows his leads, he uncovers an attempt to seize political advantage that reveals duplicity and depravity on all sides of Jerusalem's sacred struggle. Throughout his distinguished career, Robert Stone has created unforgettable characters who face ultimate questions: What is the price of loyalty, of betrayal, of faith? In Damascus Gate he draws on actual incidents in recent Middle East headlines, on historical and biblical figures, and on a rich knowledge of mystical writings to pose these questions for the millennium. Ambitious, passionate, darkly comic, it is a timely and brilliant story of belief, power, salvation, and apocalypse.