Damascus Gate

New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist: A reporter researching "Jerusalem Syndrome" is snared in a terrorist plot in a"transcendent thriller" (Time).
American journalist Christopher Lucas has arrived in the Middle East to research the phenomenon known as Jerusalem Syndrome—a religious psychosis among tourists who become so overwhelmed by the Holy Land that they erupt in a sometimes dangerous mania. A rationalist outsider navigating an insular world of increasing hysteria, Lucas at first seems immune. But soon his own obsession for Jewish jazz singer Sonia Barnes draws him deeper into the fanatical cult, and into a very real and immediate threat: a plot to hasten the coming of the Messiah by blowing up the Muslim shrines in the Temple Mount.

Now, swirling around Lucas in an apocalyptic undertow are Communist revolutionaries, Palestinian terrorists, Hamas agents, fundamentalist Christians, right-wing fanatics, a duplicitous Israeli secret agent, a ruthless soldier of fortune, a strung-out Kabbalist, and Sonia herself. Each one is complicit in a conspiracy that will drive Lucas from the riot-filled streets to an underground maze, where he uncovers the duplicity and depravity on all sides of Jerusalem's struggle.
From the author of the National Book Award winner Dog Soldiers, this novel about the desperate search for redemption—and those who are all too willing to provide it—is "a stunning achievement" (Philadelphia Inquirer).