Told in three intersecting narratives--part quest, part ghost story, part contemporary realism--the novel begins in the early 1900s, when a young man named Tomas discovers in the archives of Lisbon an ancient journal describing an extraordinary artifact that he believes will challenge the church's understanding of religion forever and sets out for the high mountains of Portugal in search of it. Thirty-five years later, a pathologist devoted to the murder mysteries of Agatha Christie is drawn into the consequences of Tomas' quest as he finds himself at the center of a murder story. And fifty years after that, Senator Peter Tovy of Ottawa, grieving the death of his beloved wife, rescues a chimpanzee from an Oklahoma research facility and takes it to live with him in his ancestral village in northern Portugal, where the strands of all three stories come together.
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