Secret of the Qumran Crystal

“Erica?! You have to help me!  Please!  I’m in real trouble,” the young man’s voice was filled with fear. “You have to come to Israel.  You have to find the Crystal. I have to pay my debt, Erica. He wants the Crystal or he will kill me! You have to help me, please! I have no one else … “

“But surely the police – ˮ

“No! If you call the police they will surely kill me. You have to come to Israel. You are the only one who can save me. Don’t give up on me, Erica, please.”

When Erica Devlin, ceramic restorer and assistant to a professor of antiquities at a museum in London, receives a long-distance phone call in the middle of the night from a frantic young man she had not heard from for over a year she is baffled and confused. What had Mikael got himself into that would make people want to kill him? And what was the Crystal he kept referring to? Sitting alone in her London flat Erica knew that she could not ignore Mikael’s plea for help. He had reminded her that he had no one else to turn to and she knew that was true. But how could she help him?

There was only one thing she could do – follow Mikael’s instructions and go to Israel. The ancient site of Qumran to be precise where someone would contact her and tell her how she could procure her friend’s freedom.

All right, Erica thought as she made her plans, she would go and get this crystal Mikael was so adamant about and give it to the lunatic who was keeping him captive. She had never stolen anything in her life, but if it would save Mikael she would ignore her conscience and rob a whole bank vault filled with jewels. Why his captor could not send one of his own men to do it she had no idea, but there wasn’t time to argue about details. If they wanted crystals they would get them.

Thus Erica sets off to Qumran as the new assistant ceramic expert of the archaeological excavation being held there. Here she meets all kinds of new people, some friendly and some a little too secretive. But nothing could have prepared her for the task she had signed up for – a scheme so completely insane that it sounded like something from a fairy-tale – the crystal that she was supposed to steal was in fact a magical vessel, more than two-thousand years old and had until then only ever existed in myth and legend! 

But there is no going back. Not if she valued Mikael’s life, or her own, for the contact that she had to deal with was no ordinary man. Erica soon realises that he is even more dangerous than she could ever have thought, that he had his own agenda concerning the ancient Qumran Crystal, and worse still that he knew about Erica’s special ability to dream about past events and was going to use her to find the location of the lost Crystal.  

Faced with these startling revelations and the impossible task she was set, Erica is plunged into a dangerous world of shadows, deception, drugs and murder where even friends turn out to have secret agendas and the gentlest desert breeze can turn into a raging storm.          

Never knowing who to trust or where the danger might come from next Erica learns that things and people aren’t always what they seem and even a friend can turn out to be an enemy, or the other way around.  Finally Erica has to take a leap of faith and trust her own instincts. But will this be enough to save her young friend and herself? And what about the love that has reached out to her so unexpectedly? The Crystal has always changed the lives of those it becomes connected with. It can save or destroy. Will Erica survive it's power?