Booklist (with star)
Like the high-tech medical thrillers of Michael Crichton, this novel deftly combines hard science and narrative panache. Perdue has crafted a story that grips the reader's imagination: Can this be real? Is it possible for such a weapon to exist? Remarkably, Perdue unflinchingly treads on Crichton's turf but emerges with a novel that feels fresh and original. A must for medical-thriller devotees.

Tucson Citizen
Fact-based fiction that is gripping, suspenseful and highly readable.

Publisher's Weekly
A no-holds-barred biogenetic thriller. … In the light of current medical epidemics, this is a timely offering.

Kirkus Reviews
Rich research for science/action thrills.

Booklist
Perdue makes superb use of apocalyptic themes in what is an outstanding thriller on every level. This one will cause a lot of sleepless nights.

Kirkus Reviews
Former investigative journalist Perdue, who specialized in recovery of art missing in Europe offers a thriller about a world-shattering secret kept under wraps by the Catholic Church for more than 1600 years. Art broker and appraiser Zoe Ridgeway goes to Switzerland with her husband, Seth, a professor of comparative religion at UCLA, at the call of dying collector Willi Max, whose mansion is hung with lost masterworks. Max, a former Nazi entrusted with hiding stolen art, wants to atone for the Leonardos and Vermeers he has kept from human view and also for hiding documents from the time of Emperor Constantine that attest to the rise of a second Messiah during Constantine's reign, as well as of the existence of a second shroud, one perhaps even more convincing than the Shroud of Turin. Unhappily for the Church, this one holds the image of a female messiah. Soon after Max presents these documents to both Zoe, who receives them with feminist cynicism toward the Church, and Seth, a wavering believer, the works are stolen from them and Zoe is kidnapped. Cut to the Vatican, where the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) holds sway and defends the truth of the Faith against opposing truths, recalling the time when the maid Sophia arose, around the period of the editorial disputes of the Bishops of Nicea as they assembled Church doctrine, and began preaching, healing, and performing miracles before she was put to death to save ameliorative doctrine issued and enforced by Constantine. One doctrine: that Jesus was or is consubstantial with God. Sophia, or Wisdom, Perdue suggests, might well be the Logos of the Christian Trinity before it was decreed all male. Persuasively written, fact-based fiction that takes on an endlessly gripping subject matters of faith decided by political expediency rather than spiritual value. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP.