With The Rutherford Cipher, William Rawlings stakes his claim as one of the leading practitioners of what might be called the "Southern Thriller." From Civil War history and forensic medicine to modern cryptography and nuclear physics, the sweep of Rawling's story is impressive; his range is wide, but with impeccable authority and impressive invention. The Rutherford Cipher is a great story deftly told. St. John Flynn, Former Host of Georgia Public Radio's "Cover to Cover." The Civil War brought death and ruin to the Old South, but out of the ashes there arose the remarkable legend of "the lost Confederate Gold," a fortune said to have been buried somewhere in the swampy flatlands of the South following the fall of the Confederate government in 1865. Now an out-of-work former dot-com executive has his hands on a set of old clues that might lead him to the fabled treasure-if only he can stay alive long enough to find it.