"This important book...brought home to me the complex and shifting
situation in the Middle East and the danger of looking for simple
responses or explanations. I loved the character of Jonas - the quiet
man pushed by his own guilt into becoming a hero." ANN CLEEVES,
author of the Shetland and Vera Stanhope crime series.
Jonas works for the UK secret service as an intelligence analyst. When
his father is kidnapped and held for ransom by ISIS gunmen in Syria, he
takes matters into his own hands and begins to steal the only currency
he has access to: secret government intelligence. He heads to Beirut
with a haul of the most sensitive documents imaginable and recruits an
unlikely ally - an alcoholic Swiss priest named Father Tobias. Despite
barely surviving his previous contact with ISIS, Tobias agrees to travel
into the heart of the Islamic State and inform the kidnappers that Jonas
is willing to negotiate for his father's life. When the British and
American governments realise they may be dealing with betrayal on a
scale far greater than that of Edward Snowden, they try everything in
their power to stop Jonas, and he finds himself tested to the limit as
he fights to keep the negotiations alive and play his enemies off
against each other. As the book races towards a thrilling confrontation
in the Syrian desert, Jonas will have to decide how far he is willing to
go to see his father again.
