After twenty years as a cop in northern New Hampshire, JJ Van der Horst pondered a future whose boring certainty could only be matched by its likely loneliness. Seven-month-long winters had beaten the swagger out of him so completely, he could no longer see the forest for the trees –  and he didn't care. The forest was just more trees. Winter had won. He wanted change.

Despite his name, the last thing he felt was Dutch. Though he'd never sported a tan below his neck or above his elbows, he figured the Caribbean island of Curaçao was Dutch enough for him. He wasn't looking for a past – he just wanted to escape the present.

Professor of Archaeology at Dublin's Trinity College, ambitious Grainne O'Toole was an expert on Jewish pirates in the New World – no small achievement for a green-eyed, red-headed  daughter of a fiddler from Doolin and an ex-Ghanaian nun.

She had more important places to be than a worm-eaten Explorer's Club in Bloomsbury, lecturing to a bunch of dozy old chaps who were only interested in the well-defined contours of her six-foot frame. Time was not on her side. She needed to get back to Curaçao, on the trail of her life's quest. The secret she'd uncovered would not stay that way for long.