The Novel · Koehler Books

In the Wake of Golgotha

354 pages · Koehler Books · Hardcover, Softcover, eBook, Audiobook · Released March 3, 2026

Synopsis

There is no crime to fit this sentence; there is no sentence to fit this crime.

Roman Prefect Pontius Pilate's words are echoed by the zealot Judas Iscariot only hours before history takes a bloody turn on a cross atop Golgotha on Calvary Hill. Two thousand years later, those same words are found scrawled in blood in New York, beside three crucified men hanging on a basement wall.

Judas, now Jude Issachar — an enigmatic social worker and part-time professor — and Pontius, now Peter Pheiffer, an unsettled defense attorney at a ravenous global law firm, have lived many lifetimes since their original encounter. Jude is aware of his past, cursed by the fateful lure of the noose and the tree. Peter is damned by a recurring ignorance, a cruel cyclical awakening that creeps up on him as he is compelled to defend a sociopath who crucified three men.

Condemned for their role in humankind's darkest betrayal, they must reckon with their pasts — and their futures — after a fateful, bloody collision of violence and addiction, two millennia after their sentence began, brings these lost souls together once more.

PublisherKoehler Books
Pub DateMarch 3, 2026
Pages354
GenreLiterary Thriller
Hardcover ISBN979-8-88824-896-6
Softcover ISBN979-8-88824-894-2

Prologue

“It burns,” he whimpered hoarsely, afraid to touch his blistered, bloody, broken neck that was neither blistering nor bleeding nor broken. Yet.

— In the Wake of Golgotha