A Long Way to Shiloh

A Long Way to Shiloh is a thriller by Lionel Davidson, published in 1966 by Victor Gollancz and in the United States under the title The Menorah Men. It won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger and the Crime Critics' Award for the best thriller of the year.

Caspar Laing is thirty, drinks too much and has just been made Professor of Semitic Languages at Bedfordshire University. Before he takes up the post he is called to the Israeli embassy in London to meet a visiting professor, because of a parchment that has recently been found and that seems to record the hiding of the Menorah.

The copy Laing sees is not the only one: the Jordanians have a better text, and both refer to a third that gives the actual hiding place. Laing is sent to the country around Mount Tabor, north of Jerusalem, to look for it ahead of the parties the Jordanians have already sent out, and the novel follows the search as a race between men reading the same clues.