The Queen's Witness

The gold of Kush travels north by tribute route. So does secrets - if you know how to move them.

A eunuch treasury official and secret Christian, Simeon of Meroë has barely returned from Jerusalem when the Kandake summons him to a second investigation: a senior customs official is dead on the southern road, and the iron tribute shipments from the smelting yards have been falsified for seven months. The sand filling the strongboxes tells Simeon that someone with deep knowledge of the kingdom's authorization system is skimming the royal treasury - and has chosen murder over exposure.

But the investigation refuses to stay simple. The palace official assigned to observe Simeon's inquiry is courteous, thorough, and positioned at every turn to redirect the truth. A burned set of clay tablets beneath the body holds the shadow ledger of a careful, faithful man. And the small Christian community Simeon leads - fragile, unauthorized, alive - is suddenly entangled in the fraud through the very routes they used to carry the teaching south.

When his closest soldier vanishes under suspicious circumstances and a young Greek believer is taken by someone who needed a lever, Simeon must choose between the speed the Kandake's deadline demands and the care that justice requires. He has ten days. He has a community he cannot protect by lying for them. And he has an investigator's faith in one thing above all: that the figures will resolve - if he checks them twice.

The Queen's Witness is the second novel in The Envoy of the Nile, a Christian historical mystery series following Simeon of Meroë - a eunuch official of the Kandake of Kush, baptized by Philip the Evangelist on the road from Jerusalem to Gaza (Acts 8) - as he carries his faith along the trade routes of the ancient world.

Book 1: A Name Better Than Sons