The Door Beneath the Sand

Beneath the sands of Egypt's Fayoum depression lies the Labyrinth, a structure Herodotus called greater than the pyramids. In 2008, a Belgian expedition detected it with ground-penetrating radar. Within forty-eight hours, the data was classified and the expedition shut down.

Seventeen years later, mathematician and YouTube archaeologist Elias Thorne receives a phone call: his father's former research partner is dead, his office ransacked, and a locked box Elias has carried since childhood finally opens. Inside: a fragment of papyrus bearing coordinates to a chamber sealed for four thousand years.

From Cairo's back alleys to the Vatican's secret archive, from the megaliths of Baalbek to Newton's unpublished manuscripts at Cambridge, Elias and Lebanese archaeologist Nadia Khoury race to decode an ancient coordinate system before a covert U.S. intelligence operation reaches the Labyrinth first. What they find beneath the sand will rewrite the origins of human civilization, if the people who've been suppressing it for a century don't bury them with it.

The Door Beneath the Sand is a literary thriller grounded in real archaeology, the Hawara Labyrinth, the Mataha expedition, and the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus are real. The conspiracy that surrounds them might be too.