‘When at last Zac became aware, he found himself in a place that had been stripped of every shred of colour. Some pain was like that, so intense, so personal, that it tore away all subtlety from the world and left nothing but obliterating darkness and flashes of blinding, impenetrable light . . . The pain they had inflicted had been, literally, unimaginable. The sort of pain that makes a man do anything, say anything, to make it stop.

Zac Kravitz has upset someone. Someone very important. He has been tortured and cast, barely alive, into an ancient prison deep in the republic of Ta’argistan. Bordering Russia, China and Afghanistan and ringed by high mountains, the country is a land of deep snows and still deeper suspicions, and it’s about to swallow Zac, to drag him from his cell and execute him. But he has a friend. Harry Jones is a former soldier, now a politician, a man of extraordinary skills and an enduring sense of guilt. He owes Zac. The debt must be repaid, no matter what the cost.

Harry is forced to team up with a tough-talking American-born MP, Martha Riley.She doesn’t much like Harry, the feeling is mutual, yet Harry needs her, more than he could ever realize. Theirs is a journey that takes them not only to Ta’argistan but also into their fractured pasts, where they must confront old obsessions. Theirs is a story of honour and love that will push them to the limits of their endurance, and then beyond.

To have any chance of success, Harry must once again become the man he thought he had left behind many years ago – a desperate, utterly ruthless fighter, ready to eliminate anyone who gets in his way. It will take him to a place of immense and almost unendurable suffering, where dying becomes the easy option.Yet Harry Jones is not a man who has ever taken the easy option. He doesn’t know when to stop fighting, even when he’s standing on a trapdoor with an executioner’s noose around his neck.