Mike Balmayne, a larger than life hard-working, hard-playing oil executive, plans a well-earned holiday with his wife but unwittingly gets entangled with some shady characters involved in international crime. After extricating himself from potential danger he returns to his oil business. Through a chain of events involving poor health and a bad choice of business partner, he loses the business he built up over years. His world and that of his family, collapses around him. Desperate situations sometimes require desperate solutions, which leads him back to his criminal connections. He hatches...

This novel is set in Northern Ireland in 1994 as a fragile peace process began. Previous attempts had failed and many hard-liners thought this one would too. A dissident member of the Continuity IRA decides to carry on the fight in a unique way. The methods he intends to employ, on a large scale, look certain to bring Britain to its knees. The task for the various elements of the security forces is to discover what his intentions are and when and where they will be enacted. Their efforts are constantly thwarted by the ingenuity of the main protagonist who is unwittingly assisted by Mike...