the Cairo Letter: Book One of Caravan Across Sea

History says the fleet never came back. History is wrong.In 1311, the emperor of Mali gave up his throne to sail west across the Atlantic with two thousand ships. Every schoolbook says he vanished. But in 1322, two ships returned, carrying survivors, a willing passenger from the far shore, and gold worked in a technique that did not exist in Africa.One young chronicler wrote it all down. Then he hid the manuscript where no one would ever think to look.Seven hundred years later, someone found it.Dr. Adaeze Diallo is an underpaid adjunct professor with a dead father, a borrowed press credential, and nineteen years of being told her family's obsession is a fantasy. When a single folio surfaces at a Sotheby's auction, she watches a stranger pay a fortune to make it disappear.Then her phone rings. A voice from Cairo. Five words: the auction was the smaller half.The trail runs from Old Cairo to Timbuktu to a sealed alcove on a sacred mountain in Colombia.Waiting at the end of it: Mateo Zalabata, a Kogi lawyer raised on a prophecy about a woman who would come from across the water. And closing in behind her: a billionaire collector who has hunted the artifact for eleven years, a cartel that extracts what it cannot buy, and a beloved television archaeologist whose gleaming career was built on her father's ruin.Adaeze wanted to prove her father right. What she finds on the mountain is bigger than vindication. It is an agreement between two peoples, sealed before Columbus was born, and everyone who ever touched it has had to answer one question: Are you here to take it, or to keep it?Perfect for readers of Dan Brown, James Rollins, and Marie Benedict who want their thrillers smart, their history real enough to Google at 2 AM, and their heroines competent instead of lucky. Book One of The Caravan Across the Sea trilogy.