Richard Cathar was named after his father's hero, Richard the Lionheart. Richard remembers his recently-deceased father, Alfric, as a delusional hippy, who saw himself as an intellectual and historian. Alfric believed that Richard the Lionheart and Robin Hood had met and he found and lost a document which was to prove this.
In his father's footsteps, Richard travels to Jerusalem where he falls deeply in love with an Arab Canadian journalist; a few weeks later she is kidnapped in Cairo. In the course of writing about the Crusades, Richard discovers that the True Cross, lost to Saladin in 1187, was recovered by a small band of Richard's knights.
He embarks on a quest of his own, both to find the True Cross, and to discover whether or not everything in his father's mind was a fantasy. It is an utterly original novel, exciting, romantic, funny, and profound.
