Seeking to fragment any possible source of resistance to Moscow's authority, Stalin split the Armenian nation between Armenia and Azerbaijan. When the USSR fell apart, the outlook seemed bleak for the Nagorno-Karabagh Armenians locked uncomfortably into Azerbaijan. Random pogroms were followed by systematic ethnic cleansing. And armed resistance.

Oil-rich Azerbaijan cracked down and a bloody conflict ensued in which elements of the old Soviet military machine were put to the test in unexpected ways. Afghan Mujahidin, Chechen terrorists and missing nuclear weapons all played roles in Nagorno-Karabagh's struggle to survive.

Geoffrey Gore, educator and inventor, was brought up in an English country schoolhouse in the early years of the twentieth century. His childhood was overshadowed by tension in his parents' marriage. William Gore, a widower, had married a woman twenty years his junior. When they lost their first child, Constance became over-protective of her surviving son Geoffrey and made him her partner in lifelong conflict with her husband.

Both parents possessed considerable strength of character. William, born in 1853, remained very much a man of the nineteenth century. Constance was already married when Queen Victoria died, but she was entirely at home in the twentieth. Her experiences as a Red Cross VAD nurse during the First World War set the seal on her emancipation.

The first forty of Geoffrey Gore's eighty years ended with his service in the Second World War. When he came to write this memoir for his descendants, he chose to close it at that point.

Lorena Deeming is a successful management consultant married to a worthless husband. His car turns up with the nude and mutilated body of a Palestinian woman official in the trunk, but he cannot be found. Police Lieutenant Mayorga, the Palestinians and the Israeli Mossad all have an interest in the case when the dead woman