LEGACY: The Shofar

A prince born in shadow. An empire that has no place for him. A secret buried beneath the holiest ground on earth.When the sun dies over Rome at the hour of his birth, Antipas - son of Herod the Great - is marked by an omen no one can read. Sent to the imperial capital to be educated and quietly forgotten, he is despised as a half-breed outsider, prey for the patrician wolves who rule the schoolyards of empire. His only ally is Gaius Bardius, a Gallic nobleman's grandson who is just as much an outsider as he is - and whose family guards an inheritance older than Rome itself.Far away in Jerusalem, Antipas's father is unraveling. Herod's lifelong obsession with the lost treasures of Solomon's Temple - the Ark, the menorah, the sacred relics hidden before Babylon's armies came - has curdled into madness. And when the earth opens beneath the Temple Mount to reveal a chamber sealed for six centuries, the discovery costs lives and sets in motion a chain of betrayal, exile, and quiet vengeance that will span generations.Across decades of court intrigue, doomed ambition, and a marriage to the formidable Herodias, Antipas learns the hardest lesson of power: that thrones are wind, that legacies are not built in marble but in patience, and that the truest dynasties are the ones no one can see. What begins as a story of survival becomes the founding of a secret trust - a bloodline charged with protecting a covenant until the appointed day.Legacy: The Shofar is the second volume of The Montbard Dynasty, a sweeping historical saga tracing one family's hidden hand across the centuries of Gaul and France. For readers of Colleen McCullough, Maurice Druon, Edward Rutherfurd, and Ken Follett, it is a richly researched tale of faith and ambition, fathers and sons, and the slow, deliberate work of shaping history from the shadows.The Temple will fall. But what made it holy will endure - waiting.

Pages: 340, Paperback, The Montbard Press