Death of Days

Cato Pike, an embittered, rebellious veteran of Washington's intelligence agencies, has abandoned his covert world, the "labyrinth", because he can no longer trust its leaders.

When his estranged father, a renowned historian, summons him to his hospital bed to beg a cryptic favour, Cato grudgingly travels to an abbey in Scotland's storm-tossed Orkney Islands to retrieve a mysterious package.

His errand, and his life, abruptly change when he discovers the aged Scot who was to deliver the package has been tortured and murdered. Soon thereafter a nun from the abbey is murdered while taking delivery of a second package. The remote abbey has stumbled into Cato's labyrinth, his world of violent intrigue.

His quest for the packages and the killers quickly becomes a deadly competition with assassins and ruthless intelligence agencies. Cato must rely on a trail of arcane historical clues and a surly alcoholic Scottish detective to stay ahead of them.

Following the dangerous riddles forces him to penetrate a secret archive of the German intelligence service and probe Neolithic ruins in the Scottish isles. Ultimately Cato finds that the mysteries are linked to a treacherous legacy of the Cold War and the two-thousand-year-old murder of astronomers in Kurdistan.

Death of Days is not simply a compelling thriller with a cast of unforgettable characters; it raises provocative questions about the eroding foundations of nations and the nature of truth in the post-modern world.