The Watchers

Lausanne, Switzerland. In the cathedral tower lives a strange boy with a limp who talks to the bells. In a luxury penthouse lives a high-class prostitute who's in mortal danger. And in a low-rent hotel lives a private investigator, who has no idea how he got there. Having accepted a job as a security guard, Jay Harper finds himself in Switzerland on the trail of a missing Olympic athlete. A hard drinker, he can barely remember how he got home last night, let alone why he accepted this job in the first place. When he meets the stunning but aloof Katherine in a hotel bar, he quickly realises that he's not the only one in town who's for hire. She's a high-class hooker who can't believe her luck. Which is about to change. For the worse. In the meantime, Marc Rochat spends his time in the belfry talking to the statues, his cat and the occasional ghost. His job is to call the hour, watching over Lausanne at night, waiting for the angel his mother told him he'd one day have to save. When he sees Katherine for the first time, he thinks his moment has come. Which indeed it has. But if only it were that straightforward...

About the Author :
Jon Steele was born in the American west and worked as an award winning cameraman/editor for ITN for more than twenty years. He has travelled and worked through seventy-eight countries across six continents. War Junkie, his autobiography of a life behind the camera in some of the worst places on earth, was published in 2002 by Transworld and has become a cult classic of war reportage. In 2003, while in Baghdad at the start of the Iraq war, he became disillusioned with television news, put his camera on the ground and quit. He hid out in a small village in the south of France, writing and taking long walks in quiet places. He went back alone to Iraq in 2008 and lived for three months with an American combat unit, recording their lives for the breakthrough documentary film, The Baker Boys- Inside the Surge. i> e currently lives in Switzerland with his Jordanian-born wife and their two cats, Zeus and Zorro.

Review :

"A seductive cosmic thriller stoked by historic fact, an ancient Jewish religious text, and a literary classic... Steele's lavishly atmospheric, witty, bloody, and swashbuckling tale of age-old struggles for dominion between angels and demons is the propitious first book in an ambitious series."--Booklist (starred)

"An imaginative metaphysical thriller... Steele keeps his tale tantalizingly ambiguous, casting it with fey characters and skillfully concealing until the climax whether apparent weird events haven't been manipulated to make them seem so. This solidly plotted tale, the first in a trilogy, will appeal to readers who like a hint of uncanny in their fiction."--Publishers Weekly

"A first novel (and first in a series) from Steele, for years a master cameraman for Independent Television News and author of War Junkie, an underground classic; really smart work for serious thriller readers."--Library Journal

"Reads like Paradise Lost by way of John Connolly, although Steele, formerly a war reporter, brings hard-edged modernity to this timeless tale as he roots his depiction of evil in the contemporary world. Clever, stylish and epic in scale, it's a tremendously satisfying debut."--Irish Times