The novel's premise involves the infamous ancient Hebrew magical text, The Sword of Moses,[1][2] and features Dr Ava Curzon, an archaeologist working in the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad reassembling the collections looted during the 2003 invasion.

As Ava penetrates deeper into the shadows, the Vatican medal leads her to the sacred biblical seven-branched Menorah candlestick buried in an ancient Mithraic Temple deep under Rome and to a series of ever more challenging puzzles.

She is helped by David Ferguson, a former British soldier, Peter DeVere of MI6, Anna Prince of American intelligence, and a group which is eventually revealed as the outlawed medieval Knights Templar, still active and all-powerful in the shadows.

Having solved the final clue, the climax takes Ava to Malchus’s isolated house on the shores of Loch Ness, where the English occultist Aleister Crowley once conducted his dark rites.

Ava is captured and subjected to a horrifying ordeal, before being betrayed again and taken to the former Nazi SS ‘grail castle’ at Wewelsburg, where she becomes the centrepiece of a sadistic ritual in which her fate is entwined with the dark contents of The Sword of Moses, the Ark, the Menorah, and a terrifying plan to launch the Fourth Reich.