If you love the Assassin's Creed series...

It has occurred to me that my two linked novels resemble the multi-layered or multi-timeframe aspect of the Assassin's Creed storyline, and I wonder what the odds are that there might be readers among the AC fans who would enjoy reading my novels in spite of the fact that there is much, much, much less violence in them than in AC. If you primarily love AC for the awesomely cool killing moves that snap into bullet-time slowmo, you won't like my books at all. That should be clearly understood so you don't download a copy to your Kindle or iPad and then write a review about it being the most boring thriller you've ever read. (The novels aren't thrillers.) However, if the way Assassin's Creed moves between different historical eras and the present to piece together a larger story appeals to you a lot, you might find my novels interesting. Keep in mind that my overall story is smaller than AC's sprawling saga. My story involves just the Western and Middle Eastern worlds, wherever the Old and New Testaments and related sacred writings have spread, and involves only two historical eras along with the present: the seventh century bce and the twelfth century. Also, the science-fiction aspect of Assassin's Creed is obvious, while my story's is shrouded. If a reader doesn't pick up the scifi references, the story isn't affected. If s/he does pick up the clues, it adds a deeper layer to the overall story that resembles AC's ancient-aliens premise that mankind's development has been guided for thousands of years. But there are only clues, or Easter eggs, in the novels. A lot of room was intentionally left for individual interpretation.

One of the linked novels, The Talpiot Find, is set in the present and follows archaeologists in Jerusalem who unearth ancient clay tablets that, if authentic, would rewrite history regarding the origins of the Torah and of the sacred writings that grew out of the Torah—the Gospels, the Epistles, the Quran, the Book of Mormon and so on. The novel parallels this story with a story set in the seventh century bce that shows how the clay tablets, and a human skeleton, came to be buried where the archaeologists discover them twenty-six centuries later. The other linked novel, Secreta Corporis, is set in the twelfth century and follows the Templar knight who finds the clay tablet which eventually allows the twentieth-first-century archaeologists to know where to look for the rest of the tablets. The number of people in the present-day affected by the secret of the tablets would be in the billions. If one imagines that a small number of people have known, through the intervening millenia, of the secret of the tablets and have kept that secret from the populace, a fairly pervasive conspiracy would take shape. If one also imagines that the creation, concealment, and discovery of the tablets have been scheduled over the millenia by telepathic extraterrestrials, for reasons only they know, the overall story would take on larger proportions than what at first appears in the text. But only for certain readers. You know who you are.