Love Letters from Purgatory

How do you convince a man that he is dead?

Suriname, Palestine, India and England in the early 1990s: the theatres for a deadly game of mirrors.

It is the Age of Kali, when all things disintegrate and begin to fall apart for Peter Coyle and Antonia Wylie-Deyne. Coyle is an MI6 veteran with a license to kill. Antonia is a junior officer and Coyle's handler in an ill-fated operation which ends with a botched killing in a jungle cemetery. In disgrace, the two spies find themselves back in the UK, at the start of a hallucinatory journey into the past.



After resisting interrogation, Coyle is dismissed by MI6 and agrees to be resettled at his old school. Deep in the witch country of northern England, the building has been waiting for him for centuries; it is riddled with priest holes and is haunted by history, bad memories and a series of mysterious schoolboy deaths. It is in this deserted place that two stories collide: Coyle's treacherous past and the tale of a murderous Indian cult.

On her inner journey from willing accomplice to rebel, Antonia is inexorably drawn into the mental and spiritual vortex that consumes Coyle when he is forced to confront his past. The assassin and his handler become entangled in a web of intrigue spun by the school Matron, a ghostly Curator, and a cabal of priests including a Jesuit who claims to be over four hundred years old. And behind it all lurks a shadowy magus who could change everything for Coyle and Antonia.



As his secret history unravels and intertwines with Antonia's search for intimacy, Coyle will come to believe that he is dead and in Purgatory.

But could there be anything worse than being dead?