Nicolas Freeling is the only crime writer alive who can combine a pulsing, fast-paced murder mystery with a poetic meditation on human nature - and never for an instant let up on the suspense. In his new novel, Freeling has written a masterpiece: a tale of murder and a quest for justice that leads Henri Castang to an astounding confrontation with a 20th-century prince whose fiefdom is corruption.Eamonn Hickey was an Irish bureaucrat working in Brussels. He was, to Castang, a friend and fellow exile. Then Hickey died of a shotgun blast to the head, and the police quickly smothered the case in ineptitude and pettiness. But Castang could not live with his unanswered questions. Traveling to the land of Joyce and Yeats, he finds himself in a widening gyre of explanations and new mysteries. From Eamonn's wife Castang learns that the seemingly happily married civil servant was a furious and frantic womanizer. From a British agent he learns that Eamonn was suspected of being an operative of the IRA.Castang then travels to the Italian Alps. Acting on his own, moving by instinct, he meets the beautiful and promiscuous girl with whom Hickey had fallen in love, uncovers a prostitution ring managed by a German TV producer, and stumbles upon another murder - this one by sniper fire.In a land of wide lakes and mountain vales, his search has become a quest not only for a killer but for an answer to why men ever murder. With the voices of Europe's poets, functionaries, and artists ringing in his head, Castang, accompanied by his Czechoslovakian-born wife, Vera, is headed for an existential duel of wits with a dangerous and fabulously wealthy master criminal - a man who will shed demonic light on the policeman's mystery; a man who has already ordered Henri Castang's death. Read Less