Shadow of the Rock
SynopsisPlot
On a humid summer night in Gibraltar, lawyer Spike Sanguinetti finds Solomon Hassan, an old school friend, waiting on his doorstep. Accused of murdering a Spanish girl in Tangiers, Solomon swears his innocence. He has managed to skip across the Straits, but the Moroccan authorities demand his return. Spike travels to Tangiers in the hope of delaying the extradition.
Story
About this book
On a sticky summer night in Gibraltar, lawyer Spike Sanguinetti returns home to find Solomon Hassan, a friend from his school days, waiting at his door. Solomon has fled across the Strait from Morocco, where he stands accused of murdering a young Spanish woman in Tangiers. He insists he is innocent, but the Moroccan authorities want him sent back to face trial. Spike, uncertain how well he truly knows his old friend, agrees to travel to Tangiers and try to slow the extradition process.
What begins as a legal errand pulls Spike into a web of corruption and concealed motives that stretches between North Africa and the Mediterranean. Gibraltar itself sits at the center of the story, a narrow territory wedged between Spain and the sea, where European and African interests press against each other in close quarters. Thomas Mogford uses the geography of the Strait as both setting and engine for the plot, with border crossings, port towns, and competing jurisdictions shaping every turn of the investigation.
Shadow of the Rock is the first novel in Mogford's Spike Sanguinetti series. The book grounds its crime narrative in the specific legal and cultural tensions of a place where two continents nearly touch.
