Richie Cathar's father, Alaric, was a renaissance man: an intellectual, explorer, archaeologist and historian. He was also a man of the sixties: a fantasist, absentee parent and drug abuser. Alaric named his son after his hero, Richard, Coeur de Lion, but left him little when he died apart from conflicting memories. Now Richie, thirty-something, is in search of his own role ... Following his father's trail to the Holy Land to research the Art of the Medieval Latin Kingdom, Richie's quest - to uncover the fate of Christianity's most sacred relic and the truth about his father - takes him from the high-table intrigue of Oxford to the imposing Crusader castles of Jordan, and into a passionate love affair with Noor, a Canadian-Arab journalist, whose fate will become entwined with Richie's own.