Wise Men

History - Biblical and otherwise - gets a hard scrabble, back alley retelling as Khefren, the reluctant hero of Lonon Smith's Wise Men, is thrust into the the political upheaval and religious tensions that mark the Roman Empire and Jewish Palestine. Khefren, an Egyptian, would rather stay home in Roman occupied Alexandria and mope about life, the danger of loving anyone too much, and the bitter job of being a scribe to Aquila, a tyrannical aristocrat with plans to be the next emperor. Life has other plans for him. Sent to Palestine to find proof of a plot against Rome, Khefren finds himself befriended by the charismatic African diplomat Shabako. Scrambling to stay alive time and again, Khefren and Shabako join the very men Khefren is supposed to spy on - a caravan of magi out of Persia and beyond. Cold-eyed and as ruthless as required, with one eye on the stars and the other on their enemies, they have a lot to teach Khefren about honor, code or the lack of one. Khefren is thrust full blast into an unlikely search to explain a prophecy whose fulfillment some feuding groups think will vindicate them - and others will do anything to prevent. Wise Men confronts Khefren with pirates, ruthless ambition, a lost boy looking for a home, a homicidal king named Herod - and, finally, with a young mother who swears she was impregnated by her god. Sweeping in its scope, with Khefren's spiritual quest and the run-for-your-life action entwined like twin strands of DNA, Wise Men takes its self-deprecating narrator through a retelling of events that still fascinate us two thousand years later. Until he comes face to face with the thing he fears the most. When all he wanted was to go home to the woman he didn't know he loved.