Mark Guscin is a scholar who has done work on the Sudarium of Oviedo, a cloth that supposedly covered the face of Jesus as he was taken from the cross and moved to the tomb. It is different than the Shroud of Turin, a the supposed burial cloth, but it would have been necessary to stem the flow of blood and keep unclean blood, as much as possible, from touching Jewish hands. It even is mentioned in John 20:6-7. Guscin provides a bit of historical background on the Sudarium. He recounts its travels to Spain, rather quickly and incompletely, and it's appearance in Spain as far back as the 1000s. He then recounts the investigations on the cloth by EDICES (Spanish Sindonology Research Centre Team). The bloodstain and other stains are, in fact, mostly pulmonary edema fluid then blood. This is what you'd expect from a victim of crucifixion. There is supposedly evidence of finger and hand marks, showing how the cloth was held over the face. There are pinholes where it was supposedly pinned to a head. There are supposedly marks of similarity between stains on the Sudarium and the Shroud, and both contain the AB blood type (prevalent in the Middle East, rarer in Europe). All the evidence, Guscin posits, shows that (a) both the Sudarium and Shroud covered the same man's face; (b) the Sudarium covered the face of a crucifixion victim; (c) that victim was likely Jesus; (d) the Sudarium's proven provenance dating back to at least the 1000s, and likely before, proves that the carbon-dating of the Shroud was likely in error. Okay. If you are inclined to believe, it is a fairly good case. The book is written fairly lucidly, fairly intellectually, a tad scientifically, but it is a far cry from a detailed scientific tome. Or historical tome. Or exegetical tome. It has images, but they are tiny, black-and-white, and not crisp. The publisher is some little outfit in Cambridge, United Kingdom, I've never heard of, The Lutterworth Press, from 1998 and small in size (7.27″ × 4.83″ × 0.29″). A tiny bibliography, sparse footnotes, unnecessary glossary, and slim footnotes. Guscin also spends part of the end of the book, including a whole appendix, attacking other, admittedly poor, books on the Shroud. Despite the books all too short brevity, it is better and more solid than Janice Bennett's 2005 Sacred Blood, Sacred Image, which had amazing color images, but went off on kooky relic legends and quoted the fraudulent The Archko Volume approvingly. Perhaps Guscin's other books are better, but a good book on the Sudarium just does not exist like the many good books on the Shroud (start with Ian Wilson's). I managed to get this book for $60, thanks mostly to Amazon Points. It is usually selling for more than $100, and it ain't worth that price. His other books on the Shroud, Image of Edessa, and the Sudarium, are selling for multiple hundreds of dollars each. Why, oh why are his books so expensive? And why won't a standard, big publisher take one of these books and publish it? I don't know. Read it in a library. ( )