Eighty years after the death of King Solomon, and more than eight hundred years before Jesus, Queen Athaliah reigned in Jerusalem. The daughter of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, Athaliah was the only woman in the Bible ever to reign as queen in her own right in Judah, the Southern Kingdom. The biblical texts, traditional commentators, and scholars all remember her -- when they mention her at all -- as a bloodthirsty tyrant. Yet a closer look gives a more complex picture, and this novel takes an unconventional view of a fascinating woman and her turbulent times. Jezebel's Daughter explores the period when the worship, the politics, and the people of the land that gave us the world's great monotheisms were in flux, and draws a portrait of the woman without whom the tides of history might have washed away their foundation.