"It was one of the greatest works of art ever made. It must be
worth hundreds of millions of dollars. What else would have
warranted Himmler assigning his most elite troops to guard duty?
What else would they have gone to such lengths to conceal?"


At this point, Tom Kirk, art thief turned thief catcher, has
unraveled the mystery that lies at the center of THE BLACK SUN. He
thinks.


Kirk is collaborating with the people "I don't trust…never
have. Never will." --- the British intelligence services. To
maintain his chosen lifestyle, always on the move and always on the
prowl, waiting for that lovely day when he can retire to the Cayman
Islands on his ill-gotten gains, Kirk is sometimes forced to
cooperate with the law. In this case, if the bloody stump of
sliced-off arm and an apparently worthless painting lying beside it
in his freezer weren't enough, there is the intriguing possibility
of catching up with missing pieces of his past. Kirk believes that
the man he is hunting can tell him something important about his
father, an international art thief who died carrying secrets that
continue to torment Kirk.


We know that the British can write spy thrillers. They may have
invented the genre, beginning with one Bond. James Bond. Bond's
creator, a roué of the upper classes, had experience in
spy-craft during World War II. And there's John le Carre, author
and former practitioner of the craft of espionage. THE BLACK SUN is
the brain child of a new voice in the literary art of intrigue.
James Twining is an Oxford graduate and international entrepreneur
who has done his homework well, researching the treasures that Kirk
and the bad guys are out to recoup, and cleverly connecting their
factual history to fictional antagonists. The legendary Hungarian
Gold Train and the remarkable lost Amber Room each plays a
role.


When the arm is examined, Kirk and his Foreign Office minders find
that a tattoo has been surgically removed from it. Assuming it to
have been a concentration camp number, they reconstruct the
markings. What they uncover is far more puzzling, and leads Kirk on
the road to the inner sanctum of the Black Sun, the perverted Nazi
cult of Camelot. Always dogging the trail of the elusive Renwick,
who he believes holds the answers to the mystery of his own father,
Kirk finds that the treasures stored up by the infamous cult reach
far beyond the world of great artworks. Despite extreme and
constant danger, Kirk is compelled to chase the demons of the past
and confront them. As the beautiful Viktor tells him, "You're
angry, like me. I can see it in your eyes."


THE BLACK SUN, the second in a series that started with THE DOUBLE
EAGLE, spans two continents and two centuries. It has enough twists
and switchbacks, grit, gore and glory to satisfy the hardcore
thriller fan, and enough historical detail and cleverly conceived
spy-craft to rope in the lovers of the intellectual espionage
genre.