It’s the long, hot London summer of 1975, and Emma Stonehouse is scared - bloody scared. Twenty-year old student Emma has just read a top-secret document she’s stolen from her father in a fit of spite. Ralph Stonehouse is an Under Secretary attached to the Joint Intelligence Office, and his daughter’s folly has endangered a delicate undercover operation in the Mediterranean. Emma’s saviour comes in the form of Pierre Farag, a Cairo private eye in secret exile after a near-fatal brush with Egyptian Intelligence during the Yom Kippur War. Can Pierre help Emma evade danger and rescue her father from disgrace? And can Pierre win his freedom by salvaging the JIO’s operation?

This story of love, betrayal and redemption - based on the real-life story of IRA arms smuggling from Libya - invites the reader into the mid-seventies London of Trotskyist politics, music and protest, the opulent bleakness of Gaddafi’s Libya, and the funereal grandeur of Valletta.