Giving a contemporary twist to the death of Christ

‘First, find the body,” Cassius Gallio instructs himself in the opening line of Richard Beard’s Acts of the Assassins. As Gallio quickly discovers, however, this is a missing persons case with a significant difference.

Gallio is a Speculator (investigator) with the Jerusalem division of the Complex Cases Unit (CCU), an elite department of the Roman military police. The missing body is that of local mystic rabble-rouser Jesus, who was executed by crucifixion only ...