Studies in Red

A retired spy has buried his past. But the past is a poor gardener.

Michael Ward is a ghost, a former intelligence officer living a life of quiet penance on the windswept coast of Northumberland. He is a man who has traded the grand, violent certainties of his old life for the small, fragile peace of a quiet retirement.

But when a shadowy, data-driven foundation known as the IIFSD (International Institute for Fiscal and Social Development) begins to poison the institutions and people of his new home, Michael is drawn back into a war he never wanted to fight. The enemy is not a rogue state but a far more insidious threat: a corporation that believes humanity is a problem to be managed and that compassion is a variable to be controlled.

To fight an enemy that operates in the bright, open, and entirely plausible spaces of modern life, Michael must assemble a pack of his own fellow ghosts: a cynical art dealer with a hidden, noble heart; a quiet scholar who can read the lies in ancient texts; a consecrated killer seeking a new and better faith; and the quiet, steady women who become the true and formidable heart of their resistance.

From their unlikely sanctuary in an old customs house, they begin their war. It is a war fought not with bullets, but with whispers; not with armies, but with a stubborn and necessary belief in the power of a few good people to stand against a beautiful and hollow lie. Studies in Red is the first volume in The Woven Chord, a story for those who have been erased-and for those who choose to remember.