In some ways Dan has come a long way since we met him on Somes Island in he has been a POW in WW2, had one surprising outcome to a marriage, and has had many derring-do adventures and saved many lives, some of them of high-profile people. But in other ways he is the same Dan, always slightly on the outside of things, always trying to do the right thing. He is now married to Jas, a former police officer, and he and his son are vintners in Oratia.
His younger daughter Maria is a renegade and has reluctantly joined the family pilgrimage, having been in what her parents saw as a dangerous relationship with a teacher. From the moment their plane lands, Dan and his family are in the thick of it โ coming to the attention of Israeli soldiers, partly due to Maria calling one of them a Nazi when they object to her taking his picture.
They stay in a hotel run by a Muslim man, Omar and his son, Mohammed, a hotel which is oddly bereft of other clients, and they soon make the acquaintance of a Catholic priest who is a bit of a drunk. But when bomb threats are thwarted, Maria disappears, then more of his family are kidnapped, and a plot to destabilise literally the region is uncovered, the family unites to protect each other and the city.
The confusion and energy of Jerusalem and the other holy places is well captured, the markets, the Abrahamic religions-resonating countryside and most of all the many many places of worship.
Even with the hostilities and history the city has seen, there is still freedom for each of the faiths to worship. To worship and to contest and to lay claim. The characters are all complex. The soldiers perhaps having the clearest motive: protecting their land and people, and sometimes stretching the rules to do so. The mercenary motives of the conspirators are also straight forward: they are for hire by any of the many factions.
