The Last Siesta

Description

Scotland Yard?s Commander Prinn is baffled when his department?s investigation into influential Arthur Sandquest, a collector of Etruscan antiquities, becomes subject to an intrusive, and sinister intervention by Whitehall. The file on murdered Sir Maxwell Blain lands on his desk with a thump – along with an ex-Special Forces officer, Rex Eldon. Blain and Sandquest had been partners in their youth, but bitter rivals afterwards. Was that enough for one enormously rich man to kill the other, or for the Deputy DG to ominously assign to Prinn a man who was adept at staying alive when only a single breath from oblivion? There were convenient clues pointing in a direction that would lead them to Italy. Prinn would feel at home on his own private ?patch?, a seventeenth century villa in Tuscany; but others would have to duel in the dust of Prato, Florence, and Naples. Where history had failed, who were the shadowy figures providing the criminals with an incentive to find the richest, and the most elusive fugitive in Italy, even though he?d been dead for two thousand years? In this shadowy world of organized crime, Prinn regretted that the forces of law and order ran counter to the diplomatic stratagems of the state where expediency has its own lethal legitimacy. But he and Eldon would learn to play their game, even as they were dogged by the spectre of a legendary assassin called Nightingale!