Book excerpt: A hilarious, mile-a-minute thriller providing a sharp-eyed satire of our globalized world, in which those who shout loudest, shoot fastest, and spend most always try to come out on topIn the midst of the global financial downturn, listless financier and ex-special forces officer Harry Linley accepts the seemingly innocent taskof spending a week house-sitting for a friend. By the end of the first night, however, two men are dead on the kitchen floor. A handful of disparate international strangers find themselves subsequently entangled in a web of deceit, sex, and murder among the glittering towers of Dubai, with a seemingly unstoppable chain of miscommunication threatening to bring them and the world to ruin. At the heart of all this chaos: a beautiful, white Persian cat.