Sign of the Cross

The second novel in an exciting new crime series featuring Gibraltar lawyer Spike Sanguinetti

Just as a degree of calm returns to Spike Sanguinetti’s life in Gibraltar, he receives the shocking news that his Maltese uncle and aunt are dead after a domestic dispute escalated into a bloodbath.

Accompanied by his aging father, Spike crosses the Mediterranean to Malta for the funerals. It falls to Spike, a lawyer, to act as executor of the wills. The more he learns about his relatives’ violent deaths, however, the more he is faced by a troubling question: What could have prompted a mild-mannered art historian to stab his wife to death and then turn the knife upon himself?

After reuniting with his ex-girlfriend, Zahra, now working in Malta as a translator, Spike embarks on a dangerous trail that leads from the island’s squalid immigrant tent camps to the ornate palazzos of the legendary Knights of St. John. In Malta, the oldest Christian nation in the world, self-interest can masquerade as charity, and what first appears to be worthless can prove valuable beyond price.

Thomas Mogford studied modern languages at Oxford University and holds a postgraduate diploma in law from City University, London. He works for ITV Sport as a translator and reporter. Shadow of the Rock, the first book in the series, was published in 2012. An early work featuring Spike Sanguinetti reached the semifinals of the 2008 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award and was referred to by Publishers Weekly as “an exotic, addictive mystery.” Mogford is married and lives with his family in London.