Castles In The Sand

About the Book

This is a novel set in the Middle East, in the Sultanate of Omabi. The old Sultan has been assassinated. His son and heir is Ahmed, a teenager.

The story is an account of how he overcomes family intrigue, to succeed his father and then face a struggle to ensure that he remains in power, attempting to introduce democracy, opposed by Islamic fundamentalists and the disruptive forces affecting much of the Middle East.

A related murder in England involves Chief Inspector James Tarrant and his sergeant, who are seconded to Omabi to investigate further British deaths there. Tarrant's sergeant is wounded and replaced by a woman. Ann and Tarrant team up, in a late-in-life romance, and decide to stay in Omabi, as security officers to the new Sultan.

The relationship between the Sultan and Tarrant is pivotal. To some extent, Ahmed compensates for the death of Tarrant's son, killed in Iraq, and a fatherly Tarrant helps lessen the loss of Ahmed's family, murdered by terrorists.

Tarrant's role becomes that of trying to establish and maintain law and order in this small country under constant threat and harassment from religious extremists, seeking to prevent a repetition of the experience of Iraq, looking rather to Qatar as a guide.

The Sultan's plans for the introduction of a secular democracy continue to be threatened, as the religious politics of a wider area, involving the super powers of the Arab world, begin to impinge on the small Sultanate and its people.

About the Author

Peter Head is an economic historian, born and working in Britain and, with his wife, living in Cyprus since the year 2000.

Peter spent much of his working life carrying out economic and social research for central and local government, and writing up the results, almost to the exclusion of work in his own name. He did publish some work, many years ago he says, on the hosiery and footwear industries. Now he is attempting to compensate for the dearth of the intervening years by writing mainly novels.

Castles in the Sand is Peter's third novel.

The first, This Island Now, was set in Cyprus and published there in 2005. There followed an anthology of prose and verse, with drawings by daughter, Rebecca, called that iguana flying by.

The second novel, Brandon Bay, was published with Trafford some months ago, a story set in south-west Ireland.

In draft is a book about his great great grandfather and the chain-making village of Cradley, in the Black Country. This is a painstaking task and it is likely that another novel will be published first - a whodunit set in the Adriatic.