A THOUSAND-YEAR-OLD SECRET. A RELIC THAT COULD REWRITE THE HISTORY OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC.

March 2019, suburbs of Philadelphia. Around a table set with the China plates from his childhood, Ugo, who has come from Istria to visit American cousins he has never met, thinks he is attending a simple family reunion. He leaves with much more: a hidden family name, a secret buried since the First World War, and a phrase scribbled by his grandfather that will forever haunt him—Ex Oriente lux, ex Occidente lex.

From Dalmatia in 1075 to the walls of the besieged Holy Land in 1291, from a monastery submerged in an Istrian lake to a hidden door behind St. Peter's Square, a single relic traverses nine centuries of history: a thorn, torn from a crown more precious than all the treasures of Antiquity, passed down, hidden, coveted—and never found.

Until a fire ravaged Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris in April 2019.

A few months later, thousands of kilometers away, in a secret laboratory on the outskirts of Wuhan, a high-ranking Chinese official shouted an order that no one would dare repeat: the spread must be stopped, immediately.

Coincidence? Ugo no longer believes it. Not after the Vatican.

Between a Vatican confraternity guarding a nine-century-old secret and an organization that will stop at nothing to seize the relic, Ugo and his rediscovered cousins must unravel a family lie passed down through four generations—before the entire world pays the price.

Because if the legend is true, the Thorn was never just a treasure. It is a weapon. And someone, somewhere, has just made it talk.

The Name of the Thorn weaves a gripping thriller across 950 years of history—Istria, the Holy Land, the Vatican, Paris, Philadelphia, Wuhan—where each family revelation opens a door more dizzying than the last. A novel for all those who, after Dan Brown, thought they had already read everything about the secrets that History prefers to keep hidden.

Matthew