The Marks of Cain

This unusual thriller involves an inheritance, murders connected to the Basque region of Spain, the Nazis, and the Catholic Church. Additionally, revelations about a group of people who have progressed along a different evolutionary line make this novel almost as controversial as THE DA VINCI CODE. Stephen Crossley is on top of it all, delivering a multifaceted performance that carries listeners from England to Europe and Africa in the company of a lawyer and a journalist who are on separate trails of a conspiracy. Plausibility aside, the narrative is propelled by Crossley's urgency. J.L. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

March 29, 2010
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.