Charlie Gauntlet is a retired lawyer recently married to the much younger Rebecca "Bex" Olesker, a detective sergeant in the London Metropolitan Police's Antiterrorist Branch. Charlie has more or less come to terms with Bex's demanding and dangerous job. But it's harder to stay home when his young wife is facing Alchemist, an unidentified hired assassin who strikes high-profile targets and demands a big payoff.

Meanwhile, Charlie is exploring a remote monastery which may hold the secrets for a new explanation of the Christian faith. But his own journey takes a strange and perhaps perilous turn when he discovers the monks who guard the scrolls in decidedly unholy circumstances.

JOHN GARDNER is one of the world's premier thriller writers, and has published more than forty novels, many of which have been bestsellers. Among Gardner's works are sixteen books in the legendary James Bond series, including Win, Lose, or Die and Never Send Flowers; he has also written six books featuring Big Herbie Kruger, most recently Confessor and Maestro, which was a New York Times Book of the Year. A graduate of Cambridge University who did his postgraduate work at Oxford, he now lives in Hampshire. He has variously been a stage magician, an officer in the Royal Marines, a theatrical journalist, a lecturer in Shakespearean production and a priest in the Church of England.