The Last Witness

THE LAST WITNESSA Thriller Novel by Abdullah Al-BaghdadiIn the ancient city of Al-Shahid - a place too dangerous to appear on any modern map - the dead do not stay silent for long. When Detective Rami Khalil is called to the eastern souk before dawn, what greets him is more than a body. It is a message: a man dressed by someone else's hands, a symbol carved with surgical precision into his palm, and a history that someone powerful has spent fifteen years burying.
The victim is Tariq Mansour - a civil engineer who once worked on a restoration project that was officially cancelled. Unofficially, it never stopped. Beneath the cobblestones of Al-Shahid's oldest quarter runs a network of ancient aqueducts, renovated in secret, used not for water but for something far more valuable - and far more criminal. Centuries of irreplaceable history, moving through the dark toward private hands that will never acknowledge owning what they own.
As Rami pulls at the thread, the cost of the truth becomes horrifyingly clear. A journalist is found dead in a courtyard. A historian locks her door before she speaks. An old man in an abandoned desert station holds three notebooks and a lifetime of regret - and calls himself the last witness. Rami Khalil has been in Al-Shahid for four years. He has always assumed it was by chance. He is about to discover it was never chance at all.
The Last Witness is a tightly constructed mystery thriller set in the layered shadows of the ancient Middle East - where secrets have roots as deep as the city itself, and where one detective's refusal to look away may be the only thing standing between the truth and the dark. Genre: Mystery Thriller / Political FictionSeries: Standalone - Series potentialAudience: Adult