THE SEARCHER: LIONESSES
SECOND IN THE SERIES
What if you held a 5,000-year-old secret and the only way to survive was to make yourself the bait?
A dying antiquities smuggler staggers into Jax's makeshift clinic in an Iraqi displacement camp. What she pulls from his coat will get people killed: an ancient Mesopotamian figurine, possibly twin to the Guennol Lioness that sold at Sotheby's for $57 million.
This is Jax a year after the Gardner Museum obsession. Still haunted. Still carrying weight that doesn't lighten.
From Mosul's war-scarred streets to London's auction houses, she traces a trafficking network that turns Iraq's looted heritage into private collections. ISIS's theatrical destruction of museums? Cover for a quieter crime — selling humanity's oldest treasures to the highest bidder.
The smuggler is the first to die.
When buyers surface in London, Jax does what she does best. She stops running. She becomes the bait.
"Lionesses" honors the women who stayed to protect their communities when everyone else fled — and became refugees themselves for the trouble.