The Templar Succession

Reading’s grisly, downbeat third thriller featuring photographer John Hart (after 2015’s The Templar Inheritance) opens in 1998 in a Kosovar village, where Hart rescues several women from a “rape house” run by the Captain, a particularly brutal and indiscriminate killer. One of those saved is the injured 16-year-old Lumnije Dardan, whom Hart leaves in the care of the monks of a monastery. In 2014, Lumnije phones Hart out of the blue and asks him to come to the Macedonian village she now calls home to get something very important. The “something” turns out to be 15-year-old Biljana, rape child of Lumnije and the Captain. Lumnije will lead Hart and his journalist friends, Amira Eisenberger and Leo Percival Rider, on a tortuous journey to find the Captain. Biljana wants to meet her father; the others want to bring him to justice. A clue leads them to the French Foreign Legion post in Djibouti and to wild and wildly improbable chases and confrontations with the elusive, still-deadly Captain. (July)