AustLit

'A terrorist attack on a church in Cape Town kills twenty people. Jannie de Villiers, a well-known liver transplant surgeon avoids death, but is seriously wounded. Two weeks later while recovering at home, Jannie de Villiers is mysteriously murdered. With too many inexplicable circumstances surrounding her husband’s death Renata takes her four-year-old son Christian to live in Australia.

'As Christian grows up he becomes interested in the circumstances surrounding his father’s death. Using the Internet, he tries to find the reasons why he might have been killed. There is little to satiate his curiosity until one day he discovers a blog site set up by an old anti-apartheid activist. The blog site claims that his father had worked for the Bureau of State Security in the old apartheid government and had therefore been implicated in atrocities against blacks and coloureds. Christian pleads with his mother and returns to Cape Town shortly after his eighteenth birthday. Unbeknown to him his return to South Africa is monitored by the National Intelligence Agency and a white underground Afrikaner supremacist organisation. They both have knowledge of his father’s genetic research on racial profiling and believe that Christian might lead them to a missing folder containing highly sensitive material on chemical and germ warfare.

'Christian discovers the folder buried in the garden of their old house they once lived in. Included in the folder are evidence of the apartheid South African governments’ involvement in a germ and chemical warfare programme and the development of nuclear arms. In a section which has his father’s name at the top of it, Christian finds encrypted genetic research on racial groups. Christian recognises that the encryption has a code not dissimilar to code that he noticed on the back of a photograph of his mother and himself in Adelaide.

'Once it is known that the folder has been discovered Christian and his newly discovered half sister, Isabella, are then pursued by the Afrikaner white supremacist group. Christian and Isabella are taken hostage by the white supremacist group who demand the key to the encrypted genetic research to unlock their father’s research.' (Publisher's blurb)