The debonair archaeologist Rupert Winfield, whom we first met in Stuart Fifield's first novel, Fatal Tears, is once again leading tours of an ancient archaeological site, this time the 'rose-pink city' of Petra. And once again, too, he is burdened with an unusually querulous party of tourists, not all of whom are primarily interested in the finer details of ancient civilisations.
The situation gets even more complicated when Rupert's friend and secret lover, the war-wounded Dr Stephen Hopkins, is charged with a covert mission to discover an ancient scroll, purportedly written by Gershom, the son of Moses, whose words, it seems, have the power to rock the British Empire.
Set on the cusp of the 1930s, in a darkening political world where Fascism is on the rise and the Middle East is set to become the stage for bitter conflict between competing nationalisms, this by turns gripping and touching novel, with its large cast of entertaining characters and Indiana...
