This is book 7 of the "Virgil Flowers" series.

This note contains spoilers for the book.

A Virgil Flowers novel. There's an acknowledgement saying he wrote it with help from Michele Cook.

Virgil is still not my favorite character, but the stories are okay, and the outstate Minnesota sense of place is nice to read. (I'm a Twin Cities guy, I don't know if it's accurate, but it's nice.)

Flowers gets involved with a stele stolen from an Israeli archaeological dig, which casts doubt on King Solomon being Jewish at all. Everybody from crackpots to terrorists is interested in it, wanting to control it, suppress it, or publish it. We get two crackpot TV presenters, a real Israeli antiquities expert, a Mossad agent impersonating that expert, a Hezbollah representative, and a red-neck genius lady all dragged into the action.

The man who stole it is a professor and minister who has lived a long a blameless life, this isn't like him.

We see scenes of its discovery. While in the end it's revealed to be a forgery, done for money, the evidence we see when it's being dug up seems to contradict this. The final reveal, when it turns out to be a part built to fit perfectly onto the grave memorial of the minister's old friend, is nicely done, though.

As of 3/19/2014 John Sandford has a tiny entry in the Internet Speculative Fiction Databasea>—for interior art. I'm leaving the ISFDB link in, since I know he's working on what will be a genre book if it makes it to publication.