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This intriguing novel reimagines Jesus’s Resurrection in an unexpected, but entirely logical genre: crime fiction. Beard blurs timelines, setting the story in the modern day, with the 12 Apostles operating in some sort of synchronicity, strewn across the Roman Empire, as if it hadn’t tumbled centuries ago. There are clear parallels between the driving ideology of this notional Rome and modern nation states, which bring their notions of “civilisation” to bear on the societies they claim to be stabilising amid social and political upheaval. The Apostles’ martyrdoms are seen as murders committed by someone attempting to obliterate all questioning of Jesus’s Resurrection and philosophy. The “gumshoe” is Cassius Gallio, a Speculator or investigatorof meticulous attention to detail, and entirely undone by his human frailty. He is a fascinating character and the determination with which he tracks down his prey mirrors that of the Apostles’ evangelisation, which has already taken the empire by storm.
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