The Second Scroll is an international geopolitical thriller inspired by the world’s greatest archeological mystery: the whereabouts of the lost treasures of the Temple of Solomon. These treasures, which are listed on the unique Copper Scroll found amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls, are so vast that their discovery would shift the balance of power in the Middle East, unleashing chaos.

Charlie Carter is an army veteran plagued by PTSD, whose marriage is on the rocks and who has sunk into a cycle of drinking and late-night gambling.  His younger brother Michael works for Vanguard, a private intelligence agency which provides off-the-books services to governments and corporations.

When Michael discovers that their parent’s death in a car accident 15 years before was in fact a deliberate assassination it leads him to Jack Braddock, a London gangster, and his sometime partner Ari Al-Shammari, a ruthless Iraqi antiquities dealer who uses his trade in illegal artefacts to finance Islamic terrorism. 

Al-Shammari is now in pursuit of an artefact of incalculable value, The Second Scroll, which could plunge the Middle East into an apocalyptic conflict.  As Al-Shammari senses Vanguard’s investigation drawing closer to him, Michael is violently killed.  The action moves between London, the West Bank, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Vanguard’s at-sea HQ, as the team endeavours to hunt down Al-Shammari and Charlie takes revenge on Braddock’s son who, it transpires, was responsible for the deaths of his parents.

In the book’s central section we are taken back to the Romans’ brutal siege and destruction of Jerusalem, when the treasures of the Temple of Soloman were secretly transported from the city and secreted around the Middle East. The inventory was inscribed on two copper scrolls, both of which are needed to identify the locations of the treasures.  The first was discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1940s and is now on display in the Jordanian Museum in Amman.  The second, which holds the key to the first, has never been found.

Benjamin is a hotheaded young Jew whose mother is killed and sister raped by the Romans.  With his friend, Ezra, he joins an insurgency group, determined to find and kill Drusus, the Roman officer responsible for the attack on his family.  The two friends fight the Romans across Judaea, culminating in the siege of Jerusalem, during which Benjamin’s father is captured and crucified.  As the city is about to fall, Benjamin is charged with taking the second scroll and secreting it outside the city.  During their daring escape, they finally encounter Drusus, and Benjamin and his sister exact their revenge.  Their story culminates in a betrayal, deep in the Judaean desert, which very nearly sees their mission fail. 

Back in the present day Charlie and the Vanguard team race against time to unravel the mystery of the second scroll’s whereabouts, at one point forced to rescue Charlie’s estranged wife, who has been captured by Braddock in revenge for his son’s death.

Having apparently been betrayed by one of their own, the team races to Israel to try and secure the scroll before Al-Shammari gets his hands on it.  In a nail-biting denouement the team unearth the second scroll deep underground at a site near Jericho, only to have  Al-Shammari snatch it from them when he appears with his heavily armed militiamen.  In a final twist the very person they thought had betrayed them saves the day.

In a brief epilogue Charlie and his wife, at the very moment they finally put the past behind them, fall into the hands of his old enemy, Jack Braddock.  But Charlie’s wife has hidden strengths and it is Braddock who has finally met his match.