Books by Jim Throne

Doctor Oscar Sample, Professor of Early Christianity, a former NFL player, is confronted with this conundrum when a young priest arrives one evening at his office. At first, Sample scoffs at the first couple of pages, thinking that they were either purloined or fake. After closer examination, he realizes that the pages contain three languages - Greek, Medieval Latin and perhaps a version of Hebrew or Aramaic. Sample gets the priest to explain that he'd uncovered the cache at the Archbishopric in New Orleans. Sample has a photographer, a gridiron nemesis, to carefully photograph each page. He asks his graduate student to examine the copies. They appear truly ancient, perhaps first century CE.Sample recruits a well-known Jewish scholar, an expert in paper technologies and an expert in written antiquities to decide whether the documents are real. If so, what do the messages reveal?. The parchment and the inks are eighth century Celtic. The group concludes that they are probably practice pages done by monastery scribes. As the translations evolve the group discusses the source of these documents and their authorship and meaning. Are these the writings of religious members at the beginning of Christianity? Before the group can decide how to disseminate the information, one by one the members die under unusual circumstances.

A tornado has visited Goldfield, destroying most of the small Midwestern town and, in particular, the farm buildings of an old reclusive artist. As search and rescue teams, along with a French art expert who appears shortly after the tornado, investigate the buildings, they find his body stuffed in a freezer.Mayor Ryan Lambert and his young workers learn from a local reporter that the old guy was the last and perhaps the greatest artist of German Expressionism, a movement that was eradicated by the Nazis in the 1930s. As the man's murder is investigated, four more bodies are uncovered at the site - models, students - each one killed in a different way.After the art recovered from the nearly destroyed artist studio is deemed original and invaluable by the first expert, a second French art expert arrives and claims the entire body of work to be forgeries. A missing Russian nurse, a gallery in Moscow, a man in drag, a top-of-the-line Mercedes, and a spate of duplicate original paintings lead to a violent confrontation amid mountains of canvases, easels, and frames in an abandoned airplane hangar...

Doctor Bartholomew Grimes is a quantum physicist hired by NSA to secure highly confidential research from the locked office of a dead third-generation theoretical physicist. He learns that the man died from a tiny hole bored completely through his skull. To recover the critical documents, he must deal with an odd collection of college officials, inept local authorities, brilliant but eccentric students, the spectre of All Hallows eve, and a mythological bear...

Teenager Joshua Blackburn played rookie baseball in a small town where he stayed in the home of a widow and her teen daughters. Years later, the daughters vanish. Decades later, he inherits the widow's bookstore. The building burns, yielding the daughters' skeletons. When the local sheriff accuses him of arson and murder, Josh searches for the real criminals. As he does, he survives many attempts on his life that claim the lives of many others.

For half a millennium, the strange writings and drawings of an elaborate codex have defied the world's greatest cryptologists. Now it and a companion codex have been stolen from Yale University. As Detective Lincoln Barnes searches for international agents who may have decoded them, those who know the documents' secrets are murdered and his life is threatened.