The Thieves of Golgotha: A Novel

The New Testament makes brief mention of the two thieves who flanked Christ on the hill of the skull. D.S. LLiteras draws these men out of the biblical background and places them center stage in The Thieves of Golgotha. Beginning with their confinement in the blackness of a Roman prison, the novel hauls you into the horror of impending execution, lurching from one torment to the next until you find yourself wishing that these two reprehensible men could find even a momentary reprieve--a level of identification between reader and antihero forged in rare talent. LLiteras's brutal descriptions paint scenes with a harsh reality that drags you deeper into the novel even as you instinctively try to avert your eyes. In contemporary dialogue strongly reminiscent of that in Hemingway's fiction, LLiteras's characters tell their personal stories of incarceration, doubt, pain, and salvation on a human level, where spiritual discovery is grasped with the gut, not with the brain. --Brian Patterson