When Moses Wilhelm Shapira arrived unannounced in London in 1883, he claimed to have discovered the oldest-ever Bible scroll in a desert cave east of the Dead Sea. This phenomenal find swiftly made Shapira world famous—but, just as quickly, his scroll was discredited as a clever forgery. With the discovery of the eerily similar Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 however, investigators reopened the case, wondering whether Shapira had in fact discovered the first Dead Sea Scroll, decades before the rest. In a globetrotting narrative with the suspense of a detective story, journalist Chanan Tigay sets out to find the scrolls—supposedly destroyed in a fire—and determine Shapira's guilt or innocence for himself.