Peter Blauner was a junior person when we both worked at New York magazine in the 1980s. I didn’t know him. And I didn’t know him when his novel, SLOW MOTION RIOT, won the 1992 Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America. I didn’t know him when he was co-executive producer of “Law & Order: SVU” and then co-executive producer of the CBS show “Blue Bloods.” We connected when he published SUNRISE HIGHWAY, which he kindly said was inspired by my New York magazine story about police errors in investigating the murder of a 13-year-old boy.

"Peter Blauner made six trips to Egypt over 20 years. His preoccupations, he has said, are “faith, hope, terror…and movies.” This novel expresses them all, and at the highest level."

Nine novels later, Blauner has published PICTURE IN THE SAND, a departure from the thrillers for which he’s known. It’s a historical suspense novel. When Cecil B. DeMille was preparing to film The Ten Commandments, he decided he didn’t want to make it all on a Hollywood soundstage. He wanted authenticity. He wanted Egypt. And in 1954, he sensed, a tense Egypt would want a mega-successful director to film there.

Starting in 2002, Blauner began making trips to Egypt. But let him tell it. Click to watch a brief interview.

Along the way to a production in which he had the services of 20 Egyptian Air Force planes and 200 Egyptian cavalry officers, DeMille acquires --- in the novel --- a starstruck Egyptian assistant, who hopes to use this credit to get to Hollywood. It doesn’t work out that way, and for a historically correct reason: Egypt is a hotbed of radicalism, and nothing would suit fundamentalist terrorists better than to have disaster strike DeMille’s production. This isn’t a short novel. No matter. I stopped doing my own writing until I finished it. Stephen King said it better: “On rare occasions I read a book that reminds me of why I fell in love with storytelling in the first place. This is such a book.”

Decades later, the assistant is a grandfather who made it to the United States, but no further than Brooklyn. History repeats. His grandson is accepted to an Ivy League college. But ISIS is of greater appeal, and off the kid goes to wage holy war. The grandfather, who becomes the novel’s narrator, begins an email communication that goes nowhere --- until he starts to share his own, never told story.

Peter Blauner made six trips to Egypt over 20 years. His preoccupations, he has said, are “faith, hope, terror…and movies.” This novel expresses them all, and at the highest level.