If you were in a position of authority and these five came to you at the life-and-death Summit Conference in Paris with the incredible details of The Plot, would you believe any one of them?

The time is 1964. The place is the Cabinet Room of the White House. An unexpected accident and the law of succession have just made Douglass Dilman the first black President of the United States. This is the theme of what was surely one of the most provocative novels of the 1960s. It takes the reader into the storm center of the presidency, where Dilman, until now an almost unknown senator, must bear the weight of three burdens: his office, his race, and his private life.

Novelist Andrew Craig has not been sober in a very long time. After losing his wife in an auto accident he believes to have been his own fault, he turned to the bottle, and to his sister-in-law, Leah, who acts as his caretaker and live-in nurse. Then, when he is awarded the Nobel Prize in literature for his novel, The Perfect State, a historical jab at communism, he heads for Stockholm, hoping to find a reason to live, and to write. The other laureates have their own problems....

The secret. Every man and woman dreamed of it. Now it's within reach...and they'll do anything to possess it. The screen goddess. The contessa. The wily priest. The American public-relations man looking for a cause. And his lover who may die for it. They are all caught between life's wildest dream...and death.

A momentous archeological discovery, the greatest of all time - and the immediate effect it has on the varied group of men and women whose lives are intimately touched and altered by it - is at the heart of this exciting novel. In the ruins of the ancient Roman seaport of Ostia Antica, an Italian archeologist has discovered a first-century papyrus, its faded Aramaic text revealing a new gospel written by James, younger brother of Jesus, the original source of the four gospels of the New Testament.