Peter Blauner
"Picture in the Sand"

Pic­ture in the Sand is a his­tor­i­cal sus­pense nov­el about faith, hope, ter­ror, and the movies.
 
In 1954, a young movie fan named Ali Has­san gets a dream job work­ing for Cecil B. DeMille on a film about the great­est of Jew­ish lib­er­a­tion sto­ries, The Ten Com­mand­ments, in Egypt. But that dream turns into a night­mare when Ali gets caught up in real-life events of the day, includ­ing the after­math of the war with Israel and his coun­try’s strug­gles with vio­lent reli­gious fanat­ics. He ends up in prison, but he finds sal­va­tion there in an unlike­ly life-sav­ing friend­ship with a Jew­ish film­mak­er. It’s a sto­ry Ali has kept secret for decades. But now, as an old­er suc­cess­ful busi­ness­man liv­ing in Amer­i­ca, he’s forced to share it with a beloved grand­son who’s about to make the same mis­takes by going off to fight in a holy war.