About the Book

Book: The Well of the Soul

Author: Doug Powell

Genre: Action/Adventure/Suspense

Release date: October 15, 2021

A list of hiding places on a strip of papyrus found inside a mummy mask thrusts Graham Eliot, Ancient Near East scholar, into a hunt for the treasures of the second temple. The list has already cost the life of a colleague, and now he is being pursued as he races to recover what has been lost for almost 2,000 years.

As he literally digs into Jerusalem, he is haunted by the recent deaths of his wife and daughter, which have left him doubting the existence of God. His spiritual and archaeological struggles become more entwined as his life is repeatedly threatened the longer the work continues. When he reaches the final site—the cisterns below the Temple Mount, a network of caves and tunnel no one has entered in 150 years and that no one has ever explored—Graham discovers far greater treasure than he ever imagined.

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My Review:

Doug Powell is a new author for me. The first book in the Graham Eliot series.

I felt like I was back in Israel walking in the Old City, on the Temple Mount, Hezekiah’s Tunnel, and other places in Israel. The use of Hebrew words was delightful. Mr. Powell did an excellent job with the land and the culture throughout his story. The author does a great job with the Biblical historical aspects of the story.

The story had enough suspense in it as it was building up the plot and the characters. The story villain was not predictable until you got close to the end and started putting clues together but you still were a bit surprised.

Graham was a good character that was still struggling with the loss of his wife and daughter. He felt lost and distant/empty from God in his life. Aftter the murder of his close friend, he is determined to discover what his friend was onto in an archeology search. Graham is no green neck in archaeology as he begins his own search that leads him to Israel. At his first dig, he and his companions are met with gunfire. Someone seems to know what the team plans in each step of their search for truth. Graham also discovers the most precious treasure he could find. A renewed relationship with God and closure with the death of his family.

A good ending that wrapped it up nicely. I look forward to other books in this series.

Disclosure: I received this complimentary product through Celebrate Lit Bloggers in exchange for my honest thoughts.

About the Author

Doug Powell is the best-selling author of more than a dozen books on Christian apologetics, a speaker, musician, songwriter, graphic designer, and a very amateur magician. He has performed on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, and has been featured on CNN and NPR, and appears on two songs he co-wrote with Alan Parsons for the album The Secret. He lives outside Nashville, Tennessee.

More from Doug

In December 2013, I attended a private event where an Ancient Near East scholar demonstrated a method he had developed for deconstructing certain kinds of mummy masks. He explained that many mummy masks were made with an early form of papier-mâché called cartonnage. Instead of paper as we know it, the material that was molded and shaped was papyrus, an early form of paper made from the leaves of a papyrus plant. However, papyrus was too expensive to justify using it for mummy’s. So a funerary attendant would collect discarded books, letters, and documents—whatever he could find—and use them construct the mask.

The scholar then explained that if a mask could be found from the right location and the right time period, then it might contain fragments of biblical manuscripts. The problem was how to dissolve the adhesive to separate and extract the individual fragments. After much trial and error, he had hit on a solution—a liquid key, of sorts—to unlock the mask. He then went to the pantry where the event was taking place and turned on a camera mounted above the sink that fed video back to the auditorium where I watched the big screen along with more than a hundred other apologists and scholars.

He submerged the mask into what look like bubbles from dishwashing liquid, narrating what was happening as he worked the solution into the mask. After a few moments, he announced something had just come loose, then pulled a hand from the bubbles, an ancient fragment pinched between his fingers. He repositioned it in this palm and identified the text as Coptic. He set it aside to dry, then repeated the process, pulling fragments more quickly as the mask disintegrated.

The mask yielded several dozen fragments, many with writing on them. After letting them dry, the scholars who had watched the demonstration then tried to read and identify each of the texts on the fragments by entering the words they could make out into a database of ancient writings. Full disclosure: out of the entire batch, I could read only one word, which was and. So I didn’t exactly do any heavy-lifting to help move the body of scholarly knowledge forward. By the end of the next day, five fragments from the New Testament had been identified, and one from Jeremiah.

As fascinating as the experience was, I found myself wondering, What would be the craziest thing that could possibly be found inside the mask? At the time, I had no plans to write a novel. But somehow the question was a seed that grew in the dark, given that I didn’t actively pursue it. Years later—quite unexpectedly—I found an answer to the question. And I realized I was sitting on a premise to a novel. The presentation became the first scene in the book that became The Well of the Soul.