In the second of Thomas Mogford's exciting crime series Spike Sanguinetti investigates the underbelly of Malta and all of its darkness and danger A degree of calm has returned to Spike Sanguinetti's life as a lawyer in Gibraltar, until he receives the shocking news that his Maltese uncle and aunt are dead, a domestic dispute having escalated into a bloodbath.
Accompanied by his ageing father, Spike crosses the Mediterranean to Malta for the funerals. The more he learns about his relatives' violent deaths, however, the more he is faced by a troubling question: what could have prompted a mild-mannered art historian to stab his wife to death and then turn the knife upon himself? Reunited with his ex-girlfriend, Zahra, Spike embarks on a trail that leads from the island's squalid immigrant tent camps to the ornate palazzos of the legendary Knights of St John. It seems that in Malta, one of the oldest Christian nations in the world, brutality, greed and danger lie nearer to the surface than might first appear.