As I began to build the mystery underlying The Paradise Prophecy, I started looking for ancient texts that I hoped would add depth and detail to the story.

My editor, Ben Sevier, who knew what I was looking for, sent me an email with a link to Steganographia, a work that was so controversial in its day that the author, Johannes Trithemius, pulled it from publication.

Trithemius, a sixteenth century Benedictine abbot, who was an expert in cryptography, got into some hot water after he completed the three volumes of the work, because the friends who read it thought he had fallen prey to the dark arts.

While Steganographia seemed, on the surface, to be about magic and communicating via angels, it was really an exercise in hidden text that created quite a stir when it was privately circulated, despite Trithemius's ban on its publication.

The volumes weren't published officially until after his death—much to the chagrin of the Catholic church—and once the code for the first two volumes was cracked, experts found that Trithemius had been telling the truth about its contents. That the text was nothing more than a clever exercise in cryptography.

Or was it?

The code for the third volume wasn't cracked until 1998, and many people believed it to be a treatise on summoning up dark spirits. And Trithemius has long been revered as an occult hero.

When I read all of this, I knew I had something special here, as if it were tailor made for The Paradise Prophecy. And I knew my two modern-day heroes—Bernadette Callahan and Sebastian LaLaurie—would find the work very useful in their quest to solve the Prophecy mystery.

I think they got a lot more than they bargained for.