D.I. Duncan McAdam is dispatched home to the Misty Isle. A body has been found buried in a remote location on the Waternish peninsula. Well-preserved in the peat, Isla Matheson—missing for the better part of two decades—is revealed to a shocked island community. A teenage runaway is dead...and no one is talking.

When disgraced spy Solomon Vine's friend and rival Gabriel Wilde vanishes without trace, it's only Vine who might be able to discover what has happened to him. A single missing file holds the key. That, too, is gone. But its contents, Vine is told, are incendiary. There were few Wilde could trust. And being one of them appears to have fatal consequences. But as Vine's off-the-books investigation begins to reveal the shocking truth, he realizes there's much more at stake than one man's life.

Detective Lauren Pengelly has only been part of the Penzance police force for less than two years, but that’s enough time to know that the sleepy Cornish town doesn’t see many murders. So, when the bones of a woman with a hole in her skull are discovered behind a derelict cottage, she immediately assumes the worst. Rallying her team, Lauren is flooded with a strange sense of relief when the bones turn out to be almost twenty years old, not a recent victim. But it quickly turns to dread when she receives her second heart-stopping call of the day–a little girl, Isla, has been kidnapped.

Only she knows the truth. Only he can tell the world. Vienna, 1946. A brilliant German scientist spirited out of the ruins Nazi Europe in search of a new life. Moscow, 1964. A rising star of the British diplomatic service whose job is not what it seems. London, the present day. A once promising academic offered an opportunity to seal his place in history. Their stories, their lives, and the fate of the world, are bound by a single document: The Scarlet Papers. The devastating secrets contained within teased by a brief invitation: Tomorrow 11AM. Take a cab and pay in cash. Tell no one.

A Russian defector is found brutally murdered in a London hotel. Only four people knew he had turned - the four most important and powerful figures in Whitehall. There's only one conclusion - a mole has infiltrated the highest levels of the nation's security. Operating in secret from within Westminster's darkest corners, former spy Solomon Vine must uncover the traitor. Because Britain's future hangs in the balance. And with it the fate of the whole world.