Pearl - Frank Delaney

The powerful new thriller from one of Britain's most skilled and wide-ranging novelists and broadcasters, featuring Nicholas Newman, the hero of The Amethysts, the pscyhological thriller acclaimed by the Sunday Telegraph as 'harrowing, absorbing . unforgettable'.

Played out in the arena of football, Pearl is a compelling story in which the past rises to dominate the present and perhaps the future.

Nicholas Newman, affluent, successful, but emotionally unresolved, is a reluctant discoverer of events that took place during the Second World War. Placed under huge moral pressure by the terms of a dead friend's bequest, he stumbles upon a secret that directs the violence on the football terraces of Europe.

One of his clients holds the key. Johan Pearl - 'the Black Pearl' - a Dutch international footballer, has commissioned Newman to design his house. With the plans comes extraordinary violence, and Nicholas Newman is once again at the centre of a psychological mystery that he can resolve only by examining his own life.