The fourth acclaimed thriller set in South Africa and featuring Colonel Vaughn de Vries.

From the author of the acclaimed The First Rule of Survival, praised by Lee Child as 'excellent and uncompromising', comes Paul Mendelson's explosive latest thriller.

Apostle Lodge looks out over the ocean, an award-winning mansion built by a renowned architect. Stark and minimal, its black opaque windows hide a terrible secret. As Colonel Vaughn de Vries investigates the depraved crime committed within its walls, he believes there may be more than one killer on the loose, all with connections to a charismatic man who, as a child, drowned his sister and shattered his family.

And his work is not over yet.

'A jaw-droppingly brilliant crime thriller. Imagine The Killing moved to Cape Town and into the landscape of the hot and dusty African veld' Philip Glenister

'Mendelson plots so smoothly and writes so powerfully' The Guardian

[insert thumbnails of The First Rule of Survival and The History of Blood]

Excellent and gripping novel . . . Like all the best fictional detectives, De Vries is brave, intuitive, stubborn and always ready to disobey an order. He, his colleagues and Cape Town itself seem vividly real