A Spike Sanguinetti Mystery Series

Just as a degree of calm returns to Spike Sanguinetti's life in Gibraltar, he receives the shocking news that his Maltese uncle and aunt are dead after a domestic dispute escalated into a blood-soaked murder-suicide. Accompanied by his aging father, Spike crosses the Mediterranean to Malta for the funerals. It falls to Spike, a lawyer, to act as executor of the wills. The more he looks into his relatives' deaths, however, the more he is faced by a troubling question: what could have prompted a mild-mannered art historian to stab his wife to death, then turn the knife upon himself? After reuniting with an ex-girlfriend, Zahra, now working in Malta as a translator, Spike embarks on a dangerous trail that leads all the way from the island's squalid immigrant tent camps to the ornate palazzos of the legendary Knights of St John. In Malta, the oldest Christian nation in the world, self-interest can masquerade as charity, and what first appears to be worthless can prove valuable beyond price.

Danger has followed the lawyer Spike Sanguinetti back to Gibraltar. The disturbing question of what happened to Spike's girlfriend, Zahra, is still unanswered. He hasn't heard from her since she vanished in Malta months ago, when suddenly his phone rings. It's Zahra, but she sounds strange. She tells him that he has to stop looking for her and that if he doesn't, Žigon will come after those closest to him. Then she hangs up. When Peter Galliano, Spike's partner in the law firm, is hospitalized by a mysterious hit-and-run accident, and a woman asks him to investigate the suspected suicide of her husband, Spike finds himself on a perilous path that draws him into international politics and leads him, finally, to the hollow mountain.

Haunted by his failure to prevent the violent murders of two innocent women, Gibraltarian lawyer Spike Sanguinetti loses himself in his work. After much persuasion, he joins an old flame, Detective Sergeant Jessica Navarro, for a well-earned rest at a friend's villa on Corfu's beautiful northeast coast. There they meet philanthropist Leo Hoffmann, elderly scion of the powerful Hoffmann banking family. Leo has just unearthed an important archaeological site on the Corfiot coastline, but the lavish celebrations to mark the event are interrupted when the body of a young Albanian bludgeoned to death is discovered at the site. When a local man is arrested for the murder, Spike reluctantly agrees to defend him pro bono in what appears to be an “open and shut” case. Yet the more Spike delves into the facts surrounding the victim's death, the more he starts to doubt the official version of events. As news emerges that a vulnerable young woman has gone missing, a frantic search begins, which sees the idyllic holiday island transformed into an arena of old rivalries, political corruption, and murder. Uncovering secrets so damaging that those involved will go to any lengths to protect them, Spike begins to realize that some sleeping dogs can never be allowed to lie.

A fatal explosion in the past. A series of brutal murders in the present. In the blazing Gibraltar sun, is justice being served for betrayals long hidden? Gibraltar, 1940. A bomb explodes, killing two British soldiers patrolling the dockyards. A Spaniard is executed for the crime, yet protests his innocence to the very last. Present day, and Spike Sanguinetti finds himself defending the violent and alcoholic Christopher Massetti in a harassment case brought against him by the wealthy and respected Dr. Eloise Capurro. Yet the case isn't as cut-and-dried as it first seems and Massetti walks free. Only days later, Dr. Capurro leaps to her death from a blazing house fire before Sanguinetti's very eyes. Sanguinetti spots someone else watching, someone hiding in the shadows. Massetti. The further Sanguinetti investigates, the more secrets buried deep in Gibraltar's past he uncovers, and they lead him to the doors of some of the most powerful people in town. People dangerously close to his own life--and fragile happiness. Loyalties are tested to the very limits in the latest gripping installment from crime writer Thomas Mogford.