A decade ago, Dr. Declan Stewart, once the world's foremost authority on ancient manuscripts, vanished from an obscure asylum in Damascus. On a winter's day shrouded in fog, he rose from his bed, walked out the door and disappeared. No one looked for him because no one cared. The assassins had made sure there would be no one left to care. For ten years, Declan hides himself away on the isolated western coast of New Zealand's South Island, riding the towering waves of Ghost Ships break and trying to forget the past. Then on a bright summer's day, as the sun settles on the western horizon, a dying monk from an obscure Syrian monastery appears on the high cliffs and calls his name. It is then that Declan realizes nothing can save him from his destiny; that he will never escape his obsession with the elusive ancient manuscript known only as Q.

The message the old priest brings-of a cryptic letter of St. Paul and a parchment map leading to a lost desert temple-sends Declan hurtling back into a world he had vowed never to reenter. Confronting the demons of his past and the shadowy forces that would turn the power of Q to their own twisted ends, Declan enters a realm of danger, betrayal and death. And there, amidst chaos and peril, he finds not only the destiny he had sought to deny, but the love of a courageous Palestinian refugee and her fatherless son.