Scottish detective sergeant James Black has no idea what he's getting into when he meets the elderly Mrs. Sands. It's certainly not anything he could have predicted.

It all begins when Mrs. Sands complains insistently about the service of a travel agent. Black, who agrees to look into the agency to silence Mrs. Sands, certainly has no idea that the he's about to uncover an international crime network.

The travel agency offers low-cost coach tours of Europe, but it also happens to transport Bosnian fighters with false passports to the United Kingdom. These fighters are performing assassinations, but Black doesn't know on whose authority. He just knows that it has to do with Northern Ireland. Is this a warning for the United States and the United Kingdom to back off the Protestant-Catholic conflict? Perhaps.

Yet when a Catholic priest is murdered in New York, the situation becomes much more complicated. The IRA is embedded further into the United States than anticipated, and neither Black nor the American detectives on the case are sure whom they can trust.

Cold Spring '94 is an entertaining and enthralling international political thriller that will keep you engaged and questioning until the very last page.