Marks of Cain »

Tom Knox is the pseudonym of the author Sean Thomas. Born in England, he has travelled the world writing for many different newspapers and magazines, including The Times, the Guardian, and the Daily Mail. His last book was the Genesis Secret; an international bestseller, it has so far been translated into 20 languages. He lives in London.

A thrilling and startling novel from the author of the international bestseller The Genesis Secret

When David Martinez, a young lawyer, receives an ancient map from his dying grandfather, the mysteries of his past begin to open up before him. The map leads David into the heart of the dangerous Basque mountains, where a genetic curse lies buried and a frightening secret about the Western world's past is hidden.

Meanwhile, London journalist Simon Quinn may have found his big break. A wealthy, elderly woman has been murdered in the most horrific fashion, and another homicide soon follows. Both victims came from villages in the Basque region, both were interred at a top-secret Nazi camp, both have been silenced for what they know about the experiments conducted on the Basques, the Jews, and a dwindling mystical tribe of pre-Caucasian locals called Cagots.

From the North Sea islands to the Arizona desert, from the graveyards of the Basque countryside to the heart of colonial Africa, Martinez's and Quinn's quests intersect to reveal the shocking roots of racial persecution, human violence, and war.

The Genesis Secret-already in its fourth hardcover printing and appearing on several bestseller lists-immediately established Tom Knox as a searing, brilliant new voice in commercial fiction. The Marks of Cain dares to raise the bar even higher and promises to be an even greater success.

Publishers Weekly

Two strangers, American David Martinez and Englishman Simon Quinn, become involved in two apparently unconnected strands of what's revealed as one unified conspiracy in Knox's problematic second thriller, which like his first, Genesis, casts recent human evolution in an unorthodox light. At the urging of his late grandfather, Martinez sets out to learn his family's true history, while Quinn looks into a series of brutal murders involving victims connected to the Basque regions of Spain and France. Both men find answers in the tumultuous history of the Pyrenees and Namibia, answers with implications so terrible that the Catholic Church is willing to conspire with a murderous Basque terrorist to conceal them. Repeated violent confrontations with supposedly deadly assassins somehow never quite result in the protagonists' deaths. That Knox, the pseudonym of British journalist Sean Thomas, supplies a “rational” basis for the Nazi genocide may offend some readers. (May)