Ex-Special Operations Executive agent Duncan Forrester has returned from the war and is back at his Oxford college as a junior Ancient History Fellow. But his peace is shattered when a much-disliked Fellow is found murdered in the quad. Forrester is not convinced of the principal suspects guilt and, on the hunt for the true killer, he finds himself plunged into a mystery involving lost Viking sagas, Satanic rituals and wartime espionage.

Duncan Forresters research on an Aegean island is interrupted first by the murder of a British archaeologist, and then by the outbreak of the Greek Civil War. The worship of ancient gods may provide a clue to the murderer, but in such a tumultuous time, little is what it seems.

"A WONDERFUL BOOK" Monty Pythons Terry Jones on The Age of TreacheryIts 1947, and Duncan Forrester is called upon to investigate the bizarre killing in the British Museum of a Foreign Office official who had consulted him about an ancient Sumerian seal. Then terrorists target the Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin himself, and Forrester is asked to join his security detail in New York, where the fate of British Palestine is to be decided at the newly founded United Nations. But as yet more diplomats die, and rumours grow of an occult conspiracy, Forrester begins to suspect the deaths are part of a much larger plan...