Obsidian Sky Book

When Brian Mendoza arrives in Mexico City to do research for his dissertation on ritual human sacrifice, he begins an odyssey that leads him from the crumbling temples of the Aztecs to the inner sanctums of the modern ruling class, drawing him into a ruthless struggle for political power as he unravels a four-hundred-year-old mystery that holds the secret of his own buried past. Under the watchful tutelage of Xavier Zapata, the flamboyant and controversial director of Temple Mayor, an ancient Aztec ruin in the center of Mexico City, Brian becomes engrossed with the bark paper pages of a recently discovered codex, or sacred book, and begins to follow the journey of a sixteenth-century Aztec shaman named Xotl. When Brian delves deeper into the historical mystery, he finds himself enmeshed in overlapping webs of scientific, political, and romantic intrigue - in the form of Alejandro Villalobos, an urbane and shadowy industrialist with a penchant for Aztec football and ruthless power plays, and Marina Soto, a beguiling journalist who becomes Brian's guide to the country, his ancestors and, eventually, his lover. As Brian comes ever closer to solving the riddle of Xotl - and understanding ritual sacrifice - strife tears modern Mexico, and Brian and Marina are caught up in the struggle. Myth and reality, religion and politics, love and danger converge, and the sixteenth and twentieth centuries merge when Brian follows Xotl's trail to a remote cave in the Yucatan, triggering a series of events that transform Brian's understanding of Mexico's - and his own - past and present.