A priest is dead. As Detective Inspector Adam Ferguson picks through the rubble of the demolished Edinburgh tenement, he discovers that the explosion wasn t an accident. When a bishop is assassinated soon afterwards, it becomes clear that a targeted campaign of killings is underway. No one has seen anything like this since the Faith Wars. In this enlightened age there's no persecution, but believers are a marginal and mistrusted minority. And now someone is killing them. But who?

At first, suspicion falls on atheists more militant than the secular authorities, but when the target list expands to include the godless, it becomes evident that Ferguson and his team need to cast their net wider. Although the solution lies in the brave new world of the future, its origin is couched in the rigid doctrines of the past. But with each question Ferguson answers the suspicion dawns that he may have stumbled upon a conspiracy to bring about disaster on, literally, a biblical scale...