Shroud of Turin

A mafia boss who cannot have children. A relic two thousand years old. A doctor forced into an experiment no one has dared to try.When Sergei Ivanov, the most dangerous man in Moscow, learns he will never father a child, he does not look for a cure. He looks for revenge. He steals the Shroud of Turin from its cathedral and forces Professor Derian, the finest fertility specialist in Los Angeles, to extract a single cell from the bloodstains on the cloth. The plan is to raise the child who grows from it in Sergei's palace, under Sergei's rules, with a heart of Sergei's making.But the child who is born is not the child that was planned.Half a world away, in Porto Novo, the young detective Bongani is chasing an impossible crime. His father died in a hotel room locked from the inside, without a mark on his body, and the voodoo priest has told the whole country that the ancestors punished him. Bongani has two friends and no evidence: Andrew, a physics professor who believes only in what can be measured, and Bilal, an influencer who built thirty million followers on celebrity scandal. None of them knows that a single thread runs from a grave in West Africa to a shroud in Turin to the voice of a Russian singer who fills churches.From Moscow to Los Angeles, from Ouidah to Easter Island, Shroud of Turin moves through morgues, laboratories, and confessionals and asks two questions: what happens when a man believes money can buy a miracle, and what does it cost him to try?Written by a psychiatrist and an internist who happen to be sister and brother, both authors of books in Arabic, this is a thriller in which the science is real, the faith is sincere, and the last move on the board belongs to no one you expect.