Shelter Rock

South Africa’s biggest secret must be kept at all costs. A remarkable and fast-paced thriller, based on real events, that rockets across the landscape of 80’s Africa.

South Africa is under attack from all sides when Elanza, a politically connected heiress blinded by disease and looking for love before it is too late, meets a naïve English boy. Ralph, eighteen and innocent, has accidentally stumbled upon Elanza – and South Africa’s biggest secret.

When Ralph disappears into the darkest part of the continent to walk home overland, a Swazi spy, the only black African agent working for the apartheid-era National Intelligence Service, comes into both of their lives. Angel Rots is uniquely qualified for his official mission to find Ralph and a private mission to settle an old score, but in a pursuit from Cape Town to Cairo, Ralph is always one step ahead and Angel starts to ask questions. Why is this kid so important? What has he found? Looking for answers, Angel discovers a secret that challenges his own loyalties – and could change the course of history.

From illegal nightclubs in South Africa to poachers in Zimbabwe and the Batwa pygmies of Burundi, from arrests in Uganda and drugged hit men in Kenya to thieving Sudanese nuns and a final confrontation in the bazaars of Old Cairo, no one would make it home without an angel watching over them. This pulse-pounding thriller will delight fans of espionage fiction as well as keen readers who see the parallels of the nuclear weapons threat in the book and modern-day politics.

About the Author

Mark Miles grew up in Nort Dorset and left school with a strong desire not to work behind a desk. Aged eighteen he went to South Africa to stay with a cousin and ended up walking home alone, with stamps in a battered old passport to prove it. The route Ralph followed in Shelter Rock and the people he met are all entirely true, Miles is Ralph. After returning, he joined the Army, worked as a shepherd (in Dorset and Portugal) and travelled the world buying and selling produce (and spying for the British government). He then bought a yacht in the Virgin Islands, where he lives, runs charter cruises and writes.