The
news came last week that a fossil jawbone (from a species related to humans,
dubbed “Homo naledi”) may rewrite our understanding of what makes us human.
What if researchers made another find, this time one so extraordinary it seemed
to validate the ancient extra-biblical book of Enoch, with its vision of
mysterious Watchers?
Such
is the question addressed in a fast-paced thriller from Stirling City novelist
Mary James. “UnFettering Orion” ($6.99 for Amazon Kindle, from Double Dragon eBooks)
begins with a graveside service for Sean Archer, an anthropologist working in
Lebanon, killed in a horrendous commercial air crash. Ellie Savelle, an expert
in Sumerian language, had begun dating Sean when they met each other at the
University of Minnesota. Now he was gone.
But
then a man named Anthony Graves enters her life. He’s the director of the
Archeological Museum of Beirut, Sean’s last employer, and now he offers Ellie a
job as well. Sean had been tracing the black market in ancient artifacts when
his life was cut short, and he had told Ellie that he thought Graves knew more
about this than he admitted. Was he friend or foe?
Ellie
takes the job and finds herself in Lebanon. In one of the digs she discovers a
metal screw, buried in soil “deep and compacted with no other sign of having
been dug.” The question asked by her fellow researcher is one that drives the
tale: “How then? How did the screw get buried in a dig that should be from at
least 3000 B.C.E.?”
Ellie
and her partners in the dig, Helen and Verrill, speculate about a race of
giants mentioned in Genesis 6:4 and in Sumerian and Babylonian texts. “One
supreme god sent down what appeared to be lesser gods to the Earth, and they
had relations with human women that resulted in the giants of those days. Ellie
was surprised at how all the stories seemed so similar, but what was the
truth?”
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