A body is discovered among some ruins. It appears to be an open-and-shut case but the more Inspector Yusuf Khalifa of the Luxor police uncovers about the dead man, the more uneasy he becomes. And his investigation turns out to be anything but routine. Khalifa doesn't know it yet, but he is on the trail of an extraordinary long-lost artifact.

A mutilated corpse is washed up on the banks of the Nile at Luxor, an antiques dealer is savagely murdered in Cairo, and an eminent British archaeologist is found dead at the ancient necropolis of Saqqara. At first, the incidents appear unconnected. But Inspector Yusuf Khalifa is suspicious, so too is the archaeologist's daughter, Tara Mullray.

2008, the Grand Sand Sea, Egypt. A dessicated corpse in found in the dunes. With it are a compass, a camera and a notebook full of undecipherable jottings and figures. So begins the search for the answer to one of archaeology's great mysteries - the legendary lost oasis of Zerzura, and the terrifying secret at its heart.

Life has moved on for Yusuf Khalifa of the Luxor Police and Jerusalem detective Arieh Ben-Roe. About to become a father for the first time, Ben-Roi finds himself investigating a gruesome murder in Jerusalem's Armenian Cathedral. The victim, a journalist, had been researching an article into the Israeli sex-trafficking industry.

Raphael Ignatius Phoenix has had enough. Born at the beginning of the 20th century, he is determined to take his own life as the old millennium ends and the new one begins. But before he ends it all, he wants to get his affairs in order and put the record straight, and that includes making sense of his own long life - a life that spanned the century. He decides to write it all down and, eschewing the more usual method of pen and paper, begins to record his story on the walls of the isolated castle that is his final home.