The Long Road. Part mystery, part travelogue, part pilgrimage, part meditation on time, memory and identity. Interspersed with glittering little mediaeval dream romances. The Long Road. A composite, an interfusion of Pilgrim's Progress with and A Thousand and One Nights and many other experiences . Except that there's nothing quite like The Long Road.

"The branch whipped forward and smashed into him precisely where I intended it should - full in the throat. I know something of medicine, and I think he must have died instantly from the blow. He fell forward in the stream, the current took him, and he fetched up at the dam caused by a fallen tree-trunk. He bobbed there, face-down." Such is the latest in a sequence of murders committed in many countries across several continents. And so begins the investigation into a multi-million pound insurance fraud that will end with death in the Grand Canyon and an ultimate Ludi Victor. 'Mature,...