Book excerpt: In 2004 the author's first book "The Lost Tomb of Alexander the Great" was published to the accompaniment of international media attention, since it reported the first credible suggestion as to the current whereabouts of the long-vanished corpse of the illustrious conqueror. In the intervening years, progress by testing the candidate remains has been thwarted by the Church authorities, yet much new information has emerged, casting the enigma in an ever more probing light. In this extensively updated and extended account, the meanderings of the evidence have been tracked with scrupulous care and the tangled threads of erstwhile hidden history have been teased apart. Thus the forgotten secrets of one of the greatest mysteries bequeathed to us by the ancient world are laid bare, culminating in the novel suggestion that the body stolen from Alexandria in AD828 and now in Venice may have acquired a false identity at the time that paganism was outlawed by the Emperor of Rome in the 4th century AD.