Matrioshka

When Adam Grace is sent to find a missing medical doctor he little realises that within days he will be chasing witches, the renascent Real-IRA, hanged men in monks’ clothing, and thieves who have stolen enough chemical and biological weapons to wipe out half of Europe.

Matrioshka is a tense international thriller that starts in Spain, spreads over Western Europe, encompasses the USA and ends in the quiet fields and villages of Bedfordshire.

It is set again the background of a vital G-8 Economic Summit, which has been relocated from Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria, to Woburn Abbey in England.

Grace, a Scotland Yard Counter Terrorist Squad officer, is assigned what appears a simple mission after the savage IRA style execution of his former lover.

He is determined to find the killers and the assignment is seen as a way to allow him time for that, while finding the doctor missing from the Porton Down bio-chemical facility in Wiltshire.

But before he has chance to do anything another task is he added to his list –helping to solve the mystery of the hangings of men in monks’ clothing, and a naked woman hanged upside down alongside them, in the circle at Stonehenge, and Edinburgh Castle.

The hangings are not unique: there have been others in the US, France and Spain, and an FBI agent is sent over from Washington to help in what appears to be a case of intercontinental serial killing.

Further pressure mounts for Grace when then CIA assigns a partner to him to help find the American doctor who has vanished from Porton.

Slowly the search for her begins to intertwine with the hunt for the killers of the women involved win the strange hangings, their links to witches from the Middle Ages, and the theft of the biological warfare agents.

Matrioshka is a complex thriller where Grace has to disentangle the web of intrigue in which he is caught, before the world is engulfed in chaos.

Its characters are starkly drawn, particularly a psychopathic clown for whom mass murder is merely a means to an end; the amiable but deeply secretive FBI agent, the arrogant CIA agent and Grace himself, wrapped in emotional guilt over the death of his former lover, unable to focus fully on the tasks that he faces.

And then there is the secret of the Matrioshka. A Russian nesting doll left one night on the doorstep of his Kensington home with the only clue to the reason that given to him by the doctor, once he finds her – that it contains secrets, within secrets, within secrets.