Paradigm

 Author's Summary

What is tomorrow's Wall Street Journal worth to you today? Where is the line between reality and fiction? Are the financial markets really predictable? Does an ancient artifact hold the key to how some of the world's wealthiest families made their fortunes?

When a mysterious granite and cypress Egyptian box is found hidden away in a secret room in the palatial Biltmore Estate, twin scientists Alex and Nicholas Shepard work to unlock the secret of its intricate dials, gauges, crystals, and carvings. What they discover has the potential to make them rich beyond their wildest dreams. But it could also collapse financial markets, bankrupt corporations around the globe, and destroy many of the world's most powerful families. As the twins quickly find out, people will not only kill to make money, but will kill to keep it.

What begins as a simple scientific experiment in the stock market quickly descends into a nightmarish intrigue of murder, deception, and mystery. When one Shepard brother is killed, the surviving twin and his wife find themselves in a desperate gambit to learn the truth about the box's legacy. Using ancient documents found with the box, they unearth clues to trace its history through the ages, from the catacombs of Paris to the Knights of the Templar in Scotland. Their investigation takes them from London to Paris, Venice, and finally, to the Vatican itself, where they uncover the greatest deception ever perpetuated by man.

Robert D. Taylor's enthralling debut novel "Paradigm" is a unique and masterful blend of intelligent scientific suspense and bold historical mystery stretching from earliest antiquity to the present day-and beyond. His intriguing plot and cast of memorable characters makes for a suspenseful pager-turn that will keep readers guessing about where the lines of reality and fiction merge.

"Paradigm" demands we believe the unbelievable. The challenge of finding out just what is truly real and what is not is now up to you.

MWSA Review

MWSA 2006 Gold Medal for Fiction

Better Than The Da Vinci Code. Wow, Paradigm is one great reality-mystery novel! It will change your whole outlook on the stock market, church history, and how you look at the world’s most wealthy and powerful families. You get caught up in this novel and then you realize that some of it is based on scientific or historic facts; it really changes your perceptions of how you will view business and financial decisions.

Author Robert Taylor presents a theory of how the ebb and flow of the stock market actual follows the earth’s gravitational energies. He makes a great case with lots of proof and enough data to have gained himself a nomination for the Nobel Prize in Economics. The back of his book goes into great scientific detail with supportive data. What you really have is a great action thriller novel for 80 percent of this book followed by an equally interesting non-fiction appendage at the end of the book with Taylor’s economic theories. It is a combination that causes one to lose track of what is fiction and what is real in the story.

Taylor makes his story great entertainment and fun while also educating his reader in many varied areas of interest from Egyptian and Roman histories to secret societies, art, the Vatican, royal families and even some scandalous background on some of America’s most wealthy families. It is fascinating and hard to tell the speculative from the hard facts. He weaves both aspects together to make for a compelling and very convincing thriller. The reader will find (like I did) that they will be unable to put this book down once they dig into the story a few pages.

This book is destined to become a best seller and a movie!

Reviewed by: Bill McDonald (2006)