How Believable Is Daniel Levin’s Archaeological Thriller?

Wednesday night, we dropped in at Sotheby’s to introduce ourselves to Daniel Levin and ask him about the plausibility of his debut thriller, The Last Ember, which links an odd fragment of Roman imperial history to the moden-day curators of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount…

We also commented on the fact that the novel’s protagonist was a budding young classicist who studied at the American Academy in Rome and then went on to law school… just like Levin. “Happily, there’s no real analogy there,” he said, referring to the tragic backstory that explains the hero’s legal career. “I’m just somebody who was interested in the classics and studied them as an undergrad.” (As for law school, he also majored in philosophy, and suggests that was what led him to the law.)

Later, we caught up with Levin’s publisher, Geoff Kloske, and half-jokingly asked if Riverhead had sweated the proximity of the Last Ember to the arrival of Dan Brown‘s The Lost Symbol. Kloske assured us that Levin’s novel had been scheduled for August long before Doubleday sprung their surprise, and Riverhead had seen no reason to deviate from their plans for a perfect late summer release.

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