A suicide attack on U.S. sailors in Istanbul leaves hundreds dead, triggering a global manhunt. Meanwhile, Zander Blake, chief of the LAPD's Art Theft squad, is flying to London to address a landmark UN assembly on saving the world's most endangered treasures. He lands only in time to learn that the conference keynote speaker, a celebrated Harvard archaeologist, has just been coldly executed. While the CIA struggles to track down the Istanbul terrorists and Scotland Yard conducts its rambling investigation, Penny Theobald, the Harvard professor's beautiful graduate assistant, presses Blake into probing the murder with her. The pair follow a trail marred by secrets, betrayal, and violence that leads them to Turkey and the professor's surprising connection to the terrorist attack, quickly pulling them into a diplomatic intrigue that threatens to ignite a new holy war-should the professor's fatal mission come to light. Eavesdropping FBI agents, an ambitious American curator, a cunning Oxford don, an antiquities dealer struggling with his own greed, a stunning assassin, intelligence operatives and bureaucrats intent on keeping Blake and Theobald at bay-all stand between the pair and their ultimately frantic search for the shocking truth.