Nearly 150 years have passed since Moses Shapira, an antiquarian book dealer in Jerusalem, up-ended the Victorian world of biblical scholars and archaeologists by declaring he had discovered the earliest Bible text in the world--an original Book of Deuteronomy, which included the Commandments--ELEVEN of them.
He offered fifteen leather-like fragments to the British Museum for one million pounds--the London papers could talk of nothing else for weeks in the summer of 1883, and Shapira was a celebrity. Experts at the museum pored over the manuscripts and came to a decision: they were forgeries, not the 3000-year-old scrolls that Moses insisted they were. He left London in disgrace.
Six months later, he was found in a shabby hotel in Rotterdam, a bullet through his head.
But was it suicide, as the police thought, or was it murder?
Historical fiction author Mary F. Burns has incorporated Shapira's story into the fourth book of her series, The John Singer Sargent/Violet Paget Mysteries. She has consulted with scholars and researchers who are currently involved in the continuing debate about the authenticity of "The Shapira Scrolls", the fate of their owner, and the whereabouts of the scrolls themselves: Idan Dershowitz, Chanan Tigay, Ross K. Nichols and Matthew Hamilton among them. With a researcher's attention to detail and a mystery writer's touch for the human story, Burns has created a masterful suspense story, set in two time periods that start out decades apart and end with the tragedy of Shapira's death. Her witty and sympathetic amateur sleuths, Sargent and Paget, become involved in the mystery when it literally lands on their doorstep one afternoon in Paris. They are driven to navigate a complicated nest of intrigue, impelled by the tantalizing suggestions that the artifacts were authentic, and their owner murdered.
Learn more about the author at her website: www.maryfburns.com and view the video book trailer at https: //www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcvHfjS0Ag0
Burns, Mary F.: -
Mary F. Burns writes historical fiction, including an historical mystery series featuring the artist John Singer Sargent and the writer Violet Paget (aka Vernon Lee). She is a member of and frequent speaker for the Historical Novel Society, as well as the Henry James Society and the International Vernon Lee Society. Ms. Burns was born in Chicago, Illinois and attended Northern Illinois University in DeKalb (BA/MA English Lit); J.D. from Golden Gate University School of Law. She lives in San Francisco with her husband. Before she wrote novels, her career focused on media relations, corporate communications, crisis communication consulting, and event organization.
As an independent scholar, Mary has focused her studies and writing on Vernon Lee, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf. Her novels frequently include noted authors as characters, such as Jack London, George Sand, John Singer Sargent, Vernon Lee, and Henry James. Her literary essay "Reading Mrs. Dalloway" was published in 2020, and the Henry James Review published her paper on Vernon Lee and Henry James in the Winter 2023 issue. She has presented papers at various academic conferences: The Sargentology Conference, York University, 2016; Henry James Society Annual Conference, Trieste University, 2019; Vernon Lee: Aesthetics & Empathy at Churchill College, Cambridge, 2022; Keynote Speaker, Teesside University Postgraduate Conference 2023: Ethics, Literature, Culture. Her website is www.maryfburns.com
Mary F. Burns writes historical fiction, including an historical mystery series featuring the artist John Singer Sargent and the writer Violet Paget (aka Vernon Lee). She is a member of and frequent speaker for the Historical Novel Society, as well as the Henry James Society and the International Vernon Lee Society. Ms. Burns was born in Chicago, Illinois and attended Northern Illinois University in DeKalb (BA/MA English Lit); J.D. from Golden Gate University School of Law. She lives in San Francisco with her husband.
