It eventually found its way into a safety deposit box in Stasi’s hometown of Hicksville, where the links between the subject and the author significantly strengthened. Intrigued by these recurring Judas omens and being an ever-intrepid reporter, Stasi started doing extensive research and discovered that a Gospel of Judas, which Pagels wrote extensively about, first came into existence about 2,000 years ago and had circulated on the black market before disappearing for decades. I thought ‘that was two Judases in two days, so I must be going straight to hell.’ It’s like he was calling me or something.” There on the front table, there’s a book called Reading Judas by Elaine Pagels, who is a scholar at Princeton. A few days later, I was in Princeton, NJ, with my daughter and she insisted that we go to the Princeton bookstore. “I started reading it, and it was very interesting. I asked everybody in my family if they had brought it and no one had, because it was 40 years old,” she explained.

I never saw it before and I took it down. I look up on this shelf, and there’s this book I, Judas. “I’m laying on the couch in our house in Atlantic Beach that we’d had for 12 years. And while Stasi had no intention of creating a sequel to her first book, certain signs pointed her down this path, beginning with the discovery of a copy of the 1977 Taylor Caldwell novel I, Judas in her Atlantic Beach home. New York City reporter Alessandra Russo returns in this Dan Brown-like story centered on tracking down the missing pages of the Gospel of Judas, a heretical manuscript that was unearthed in Al-Minya, Egypt, in 1970 and declares that Judas was the beloved, and not the betrayer, of Jesus Christ.

The recent release of Book of Judas represents Stasi’s second full-length foray into fiction and is the follow-up to her 2013 debut, The Sixth Station. Add Daily News columnist Linda Stasi to the list. In the annals of literature, there are numerous journalists turned novelists whose ranks include Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Joan Didion, Susan Sontag and Carl Hiassen.

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