Sanctuary by Raymond Khoury

Naples, 1750. In the dead of night, three men with swords burst into the bed chamber of the Marquis de Montferrat. Their leader, Raimundo di Sangro – the Prince of San Severo – accuses him of being an imposter, and demands to know a secret he believes the marquis harbors. The false marquis resists and manages to escape, leaving behind a burning palazzo and a raging prince now obsessed with finding his quarry – and his secret – at any cost.

Baghdad, 2003. An army unit tracking Saddam’s cronies stages a spectacular raid on a fortified villa and makes a horrifying discovery in its state-of-the-art, concealed lab where dozens—men, women, children—have died, the subjects of gruesome experiments. The mysterious scientist they were after, a man believed to be working on a bioweapon and known only as the hakeem—the doctor—escapes, taking with him the startling truth about his work.

In one of his victims’ cells, a puzzling clue is left: an Ouroboros – the tail devourer – a circular symbol of a snake that’s feeding on its own tail. As the power of the symbol comes to light, revealing the centuries of mystery and pain left in its wake, one unsuspecting woman – Mia Bishop, a geneticist – stands at the center of a conspiracy that could change the world forever.

From Baghdad to the chaos of a Beirut still reeling from a fresh war in the fall of 2006, to the lost villages of eastern Turkey and northern Iraq by way of epic chapters set in eighteenth-century Europe, and in the masterful hands of international bestseller Raymond Khoury, The Sanctuary delivers the same rapid-fire suspense and provocative scholarship that made The Last Templar an international blockbuster.