When the fourteen year-old daughter of a British government minister leaves the country to join ISIS, MI7 despatches a cohort of agents to Turkey to intercept her en route.

However, maybe not everything is as it seems. How to explain, for example, her long-standing prior antipathy to Islamofascism? Her sudden conversion to radicalism on the very day of her departure? The fact that there is neither sight nor sign of her in Istanbul - or elsewhere?

Agent John Mordred is assigned to investigate. Soon, he has theories of his own, and they fly in the face of the prevailing wisdom. Along the way, he is forced to face an impossible question. How to account for the appeal, to some British citizens, of an organisation that engages in genocide, mass torture and the reduction of ethnically dissimilar women to sex slaves?

Barbarism seems to be banging on the doors of civilisation again, in a way unseen since the dark days of the 1930s. Yet for every evil Mordred uncovers, a counterbalancing good appears. His quest leads him from London to the shores of East Africa, and a confrontation with the overwhelming banality of violence and the all-pervading power of ideological malice.