When a child is kidnapped by his unstable mother, the father turns to Joe Tiplady--offering him a lot of money to find the boy and bring him back. It soon becomes clear that Joe will have to earn every cent: mother and son are in war-torn Syria, and they've willingly joined the ranks of ISIS.

Meanwhile Zeke Chandler, CIA deputy director, is in Albania, where four electrocuted bodies have been found on a mountainside near a secret black-ops facility. Two seemingly unrelated incidents, but Joe will find himself crossing paths with Zeke again.

From the Hollywood underworld to bombed-out Aleppo, via a controversial US election and a global refugee crisis, Joe's hunt for the missing boy will send him to the darkest, most dangerous places in the modern world. And his search may force him to confront the unfinished business in his own murky past--that is, if he survives.

John Sweeney is a writer and journalist who, while working for the BBC, has challenged both Donald Trump over his association with a Russian-born gangster--Trump walked out on him--and Vladimir Putin over the war in Ukraine. Sweeney became a YouTube sensation in 2007, when, while filming 'Scientology and Me' for Panorama, he lost his temper with Tommy Davis, a senior member of the Church of Scientology. As a reporter, first for the Observer and then for the BBC, Sweeney has covered wars and chaos in more than eighty countries and been undercover to a number of tyrannies, including Chechnya, North Korea and Zimbabwe. He has helped free seven people falsely convicted of killing their babies, starting with Sally Clark and Angela Cannings. Over the course of his career, John has won an Emmy, two Royal Television Society Awards, a Sony Gold Award, a What the Papers Say Journalist of the Year Award, an Amnesty International Award and the Paul Foot Award. Sweeney's first novel, Elephant Moon, was published to much acclaim in 2012. His hobby is annoying the Church of Scientology.