Book excerpt: As the new head of the Secret Intelligence Service, Davina Graham faces her most daunting challenge: solving a series of seemingly random political murders in international waters The first female head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, Davina Graham is taking a well-deserved holiday with her lover, advertising executive Tony Walden. But her Venetian idyll is short-lived. On the Grand Canal, widowed US Secretary of the Defense Henry Franklyn and his daughter are killed when a bomb blows their gondola to smithereens. The local police believe it was the work of the rabid Red Brigade or the Palestine Liberation Organization because Franklyn was a Jew. But Davina is certain that Igor Borisov, the power-hungry head of the KGB who ordered the assassination of Davina’s Russian defector husband, is behind it. Another murder soon makes international headlines: the massacre of France’s minister of the interior and her family. Then the Soviet prime minister is killed in Poland, followed by the death of a pacifist British priest in London. The assassinations bring Davina’s ex-lover out of retirement. Forced to once again join forces with Intelligence agent Colin Lomax, while coping with a sudden death in her own family, Davina is determined to find evidence linking Borosov to the executions. The hunt leads to a shadowy organization called the Company of Saints, a private brigade of hired killers whose chilling end game is just beginning. The Company of Saints is the 4th book in the Davina Graham Thrillers, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.