The Man With No Face — Peter May

There are two men on their way to Brussels from the UK: Neil Bannerman, an iconoclastic journalist on Scotland's Daily Standard whose irate editor wants him out of the way, and Kale -- a professional assassin.

Expecting to find only a difficult, dreary political investigation in Belgium, Bannerman has barely settled in when tragedy strikes. His host, a fellow journalist, along with a British Cabinet Minister, are discovered dead in the Minister's elegant Brussels townhouse. Apparently they have shot each other. But the dead journalist's young autistic daughter, Tania, was hidden in a closet during the killings, and when she draws a chilling picture of a third party -- a man with no face -- Bannerman suddenly finds himself a reluctant participant in a desperate murder investigation.

As the facts slowly begin to emerge under Bannerman's scrutiny, he comes to suspect that the shootings may have a deep and foul link with the rotten politics that brought him to Brussels in the first place. And as Kale threatens to strike again, Bannerman begins to feel a change within himself. His jaded professionalism is combining with a growing concern for the lonely and frightened Tania, and a strong attraction for a courageous woman called Sally, to draw him out of himself and into the very heart of a profound, cold-blooded, and infinitely dangerous conspiracy.