Some evil never dies. Some waits.
Sean Doyle thought his days of hunting monsters were over.
After decades with the Counter Terrorist Unit, surviving enemies from the IRA and the Triads to ISIS and the Ukrainian Mafia, he's been relegated to a desk, training younger operatives and wondering if his best days are behind him.
Then comes an offer he can't refuse: £25 million to rescue the kidnapped wife of one of Britain's richest men.
The trail leads to a ruthless billionaire art dealer, but the woman at the centre of it all is no ordinary hostage. Men will kill to possess her. Empires have been built around her. And her face appears in a painting more than three hundred years old.
As Doyle digs deeper, the truth becomes increasingly terrifying.
His only allies are a brilliant ex-soldier and hacker, an IRA explosives expert whose father Doyle once killed, and an alcoholic, defrocked priest with secrets of his own.
With the body count rising and the past refusing to stay buried, Doyle discovers that what began as a hostage rescue is something far more sinister.
This was never a kidnapping. It was a ritual.
And the evil behind it has been waiting a very long time.
This time, bullets won't be enough.