Autopsy of a Saint

By Adrian Corso

The miracle held for seventeen centuries. The forensic pathologist needed two days to break it.

When a tremor splits a sealed tomb in the Catacombs of Callixtus, the Vatican quietly summons Dr. David Halsey, a consultant with a reputation for exact answers and a past that proves how much an exact answer can cost. Inside the chamber: Saint Cecilia, kneeling in prayer after 1,700 years. Incorrupt. Impossible. Venerated by millions.

Then Halsey's instruments find the copper wire threaded through her bones.

The miracle is engineering, built in 303 AD by a man who confessed in lead and hid the confession in stone. A scraped manuscript in Avignon proves something worse: the Church has known since the Black Death, and the quiet machinery that kept a wired skeleton on its knees for centuries is still protecting living men today.

Vatican archivist Isabella Conti has her own name in that machinery's files: a brother, a settlement, a silence she has carried for seventeen years. Accounts get called in. Credentials vanish. A witness is silenced behind a locked door. What remains is a choice about what the truth is worth when the institution holding it sets the price.

Some lies are load-bearing. Remove one, and learn what it was holding up.

For readers of Dan Brown and Glenn Cooper.

Themes: incorrupt saints, forensic investigation, Vatican cover-up, institutional secrets, religious conspiracy

A standalone thriller.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GM5CBWYK
• ISBN13: 9798247197607
• Release Date: February 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 216 Pages
• Weight: 0.59 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"