Press Release on Favorite Novel!!

This just in from my guy at Harvest House Publishing:

Eugene, Oregon— January 19, 2009—Americans may think they have heard everything there is to know about Abraham Lincoln’s assassination and its aftermath. But a new Harvest House novel, The Rose Conspiracy (January) by Craig Parshall, scheduled for a Feb. 4 blog tour with FIRST Wild Card Tours, may reveal something entirely new—and as equally chilling.

Parshall, an accomplished civil liberties and media law attorney, wraps a compelling fiction suspense tale around some little known but startling facts surrounding the events following Lincoln’s death in 1865.

Called “superb, fascinating, and scintillating,” by veteran Hollywood filmmaker Ken Wales, The Rose Conspiracy focuses on a mysterious present-day murder within in the hallowed walls of The Smithsonian Institution. The plot’s trail leaps off the pages of the John Wilkes Booth diary, which is being analyzed at the precise moment that the Secretary of the Smithsonian is slain.

The criminal investigation soon intersects with a strange historical triumvirate from the 19th Century: Albert Pike, the only Confederate officer who fought for the South to later have his own statue (still visible today) erected in Washington D.C., Vinne Ream, Pike’s love interest and a beautiful and flirtatious artist who sculpted Lincoln before his assassination, and Vice-President Andrew Johnson who succeeded Lincoln but who narrowly missed being removed from office by the key vote of a Senator – a Senator who happened to have been lobbied personally by Ream. Two years before that impeachment battle, Johnson had extended a Presidential pardon to his fellow Freemason Pike for alleged war crimes committed against the North. The connecting point among all three characters, Parshall notes in his novel, was the fact that all were Freemasons. More than that, in Albert Pike’s case, he was an international leader and intellectual architect of that secret society.

But the deeper revelation in The Rose Conspiracy comes with what Parshall has uncovered regarding the beliefs of the Free Mason philosophers who shaped the intellectual destiny of “The Craft” for hundreds of years. Starting with Freemason thinkers of the 20th Century, Parshall works his way back to the 19th Century Albert Pike, and farther, back to 16th Century Freemason occultists to unveil, the novel suggests, their secret pursuit, nurtured since the inception of Masonry and one which they believed stretched back to the beginning of civilization.

“… The book reads like a story by John Grisham, Vince Flynn, or Tom Clancy … The story-telling is superb,” says reviewer John Bernstein (CBA Retailers + Resources, January 2009).

Craig Parshall is the Senior Vice-President and General Counsel for National Religious Broadcasters (NRB). The Rose Conspiracy is his seventh legal thriller.


Happy Reading!