Cato Pike, an embittered, rebellious veteran of Washington's intelligence agencies, has abandoned his covert world, the "labyrinth", because he can no longer trust its leaders.
When his estranged father, a renowned historian, summons him to his hospital bed to beg a cryptic favour, Cato grudgingly travels to an abbey in Scotland's storm-tossed Orkney Islands to retrieve a mysterious package.
His errand, and his life, abruptly change when he discovers the aged Scot who was to deliver the package has been tortured and murdered. Soon thereafter a nun from the abbey is murdered while taking delivery of a second package. The remote abbey has stumbled into Cato's labyrinth, his world of violent intrigue.
His quest for the packages and the killers quickly becomes a deadly competition with assassins and ruthless intelligence agencies. Cato must rely on a trail of arcane historical clues and a surly alcoholic Scottish detective to stay ahead of them.
Following the dangerous riddles forces him to penetrate a secret archive of the German intelligence service and probe Neolithic ruins in the Scottish isles. Ultimately Cato finds that the mysteries are linked to a treacherous legacy of the Cold War and the two-thousand-year-old murder of astronomers in Kurdistan.
Death of Days is not simply a compelling thriller with a cast of unforgettable characters; it raises provocative questions about the eroding foundations of nations and the nature of truth in the post-modern world.
