THE GOLDEN SCALES

The launch of a major new detective series set in modern-day Cairo - moving between its labyrinthine back streets, and its shining towerblock - featuring Makana, an exiled Sudanese private investigator, escaping his own troubled past... A lost child. A missing hero. A bitter rivalry. In Cairo the ghosts of the past are stirring... The ancient city of Cairo is a whirling mix of the old and the new, where fates collide and the super rich rub shoulders with the desperate and the dispossessed. It is a place where ambition and corruption go hand in hand, and where people can disappear in the blink of an eye. Makana is a former police inspector who fled for his life from his native Sudan seven years ago. Down on his luck and haunted by the past, he lives on a rickety Nile houseboat. When the notorious and powerful Saad Hanafi hires him to track down a missing person Makana is in no position to refuse him. Hanafi, whose past is as shady as his fortune is glittering, is the owner of Cairo's star-studded football team. His most valuable player has just vanished and Adil Romario's disappearance threatens to bring down not only Hanafi's private empire, but the entire country. But why should the city's most powerful man hire its lowliest private detective? Thrust into a dangerous and glittering world Makana's investigation leads him into the treacherous underbelly of his adopted country - where he encounters Muslim extremists, Russian gangsters and a desperate mother hunting for her missing daughter - it becomes a trail that stirs up painful memories, leading him back into the sights of an old and dangerous enemy...