On a pristine September morning in 2001, I stood on a hilltop in New Jersey and watched the Twin Towers collapse into heaps of smoking rubble. It inspired me to read up on Islam and the centuries-old conflicts between East and West, and an ongoing turf war over a tiny piece of real estate in Jerusalem called “Temple Mount”—the sacred crossroads of the three Abrahamic religions, where fragile politics and hardline ideologies are so extreme, that any single act of aggression committed there could spark a third world war. In The Sacred Bones, I imagined one such event that might ignite the tinderbox.