Michael Crichton, who wrote the same book 15 times

in this case "Eaters of the Dead", which channels Beowulf through the eyes of the Muslim court figure Ibn Fadlan, dispatched from Baghdad on an actual expedition to the Volga in the tenth century.

The novel is thin enough, once you've figured out the game, to dispatch with in three hours, but for those too lazy to read when they can have a book read to them, here is an abridged version in two parts, free for the taking:

And for some academic treatment of yet another Crichton work rich in academic veneer, see
Michael Crichton and Fake News