Photographing God

If visiting extraterrestrials revealed their presence what difference would it make? "Photographing God" is a homage to such First Contact movies as "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", "2010" and "The Abyss". The novel attempts to represent a scientifically credible encounter with a space faring race. On the edge of extinction, the dying visitors face a dilemma. Do they make a gift of their star ship to the peoples of the world or steer it into the interstellar depths where it will become their tomb? The main characters are Collette Bonnington and Holly Foster. Collette is a US astronomer hired by the Pentagon to head investigations into a sudden increase in extraterrestrial activity which includes the disabling of an orbital telescope, the abduction of a US mercenary in Africa, the buzzing of a Chilean cargo ship, the intervention in a Chinese Red Army ambush of a convoy of fleeing refugees and the memory-wiping of rioting in-mates in a US prison. Holly Foster is a young English schoolgirl who, on the night she is rescued from an attempted rape, by passing alien craft, realizes that the "prank" texts she has been receiving originate off-world. As the novel builds to its climax over the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem the reader is asked to consider if our world of religious division is ready for open First Contact?