Lost Temple - Softcover

c1250 BC.The thousand ships of Greece set sail for Troy.Aboard are fabled heroes such as Agamemnon, Menelaus, Odysseus and Achilles - but also a detachment from Crete led by Idomeneus, grandson of the legendary King Minos. Few will return.

1941.While excavating the ruins of the Minoan palace of Knossos on Crete, English archaeologist John Pemberton uncovers a strange cave which seems to have been excavated more than three thousand years ago. A stone plaque carved with Minoan script hints at the cave's important history, but the language is unknown and has resisted fifty years of attempts to decipher it. Before Pemberton can learn more, the German invasion of Crete begins and he is forced to flee for his life across the island.

1943.Klaus Belzin, a major in the elite Sonderkommando Rosenberg, scours occupied Greece for the identities and assets of local Jews.But when he breaks into a Byzantine monastery which he suspects of harbouring fugitives, he finds an ancient manuscript: part of a lost poem hitherto known only by references in later authors. It continues the tale begun in the Iliad - and offers tantalising hints to the location of the mythical White Island where the heroes of Troy were buried.

1947.SOE officer Sam Grant had a good war, right up to the moment he was court-martialled for striking a superior.Now he's a smuggler, running guns to Jewish insurgents in Palestine.But he has a secret: a notebook given to him by a dying archaeologist during the German invasion of Crete in 1941.The knowledge it contains could point the way to one of the greatest treasures of antiquity.
Alan Reed never fired a shot against the Nazis; he spent the war behind a desk pushing papers.But the desk was in Station X, the code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park, and the papers in question were top-secret German intercepts.A brilliant Oxford classicist and expert in Minoan civilisation, Reed spent the war using his linguistic gifts to break Hitler's codes.Now, three years on, he's happy to return to the placid life of an Oxford don.But the spymasters have a new challenge for him

Set in the eastern Mediterranean at the dawn of the Cold War, The Lost Temple follows Grant and Reed - together with the beautiful, lethal Greek partisan Marina Kimos - on a breakneck chase to find the legendary treasure of Achilles.As the first proxy battles of the cold war rage in Greece, they must evade guerrillas, Soviet agents, former Nazis and the CIA to solve the ancient clues and riddles scattered through history that will lead them to the treasure.For the shield of Achilles is not just a priceless artefact from the lost age of heroes.It contains a terrible power which, if unleashed, could decide the last conflict between East and West as dramatically as it decided the first.

Tom Harper (real name Edwin Thomas) won the CWA debut award in 2001 for The Blighted Cliffs. He also wrote The Mosaic of Shadows, Knights of the Cross, and Siege of Heaven, published by Random House.