Ariadne's Children

Across the decades and two world wars, from England to the Aegean unfolds a legacy of failed expectation, deceit and violent death, the resolution of which lies in the terrible decoding of a bloodline. It started with a bang. The bullet which killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 not only triggered the Great War, but grazed the temple of Lionel Robertson - patriarch, collector and old rogue - and ignites the gunpowder trail of this extraordinary novel. Robertson's flight from the Balkans leads him to Crete and a lifelong obsession with the excavation there of Ariadne's Summer Palace. But for subsequent generations of the Robertson family, a dark shadow emanates from the ancient site, a series of mysteries which will engulf Lionel's son and even his grandson.