In his most dazzling thriller to date, Philip Kerr spins a tale of high adventure in which science, politics, and human frailty combine to take us on a stunning foray into the nature of man. Clinging to the Southwest face of Annapurna, the climber cuts another handhold. Suddenly everything goes still—then the mountain roars, shaking loose its killing load, tumbling the climber before it. In an ice cave high in the Himalayas, a perfectly preserved skull is found. A fossil from a long-ago era, it is neither ape nor man.Three hundred miles away in the Punjab, Pakistan and India rattle their nuclear arsenals, edging ever closer to catastrophe. And in a lab on the Berkeley campus, a paleoanthropologist learns that what she took to be a fossil find of the first order is in fact the scientific discovery of a lifetime—proof of an alternate line of hominid development. Missing Link. Yeti. New Species. Hairy Man. Call it what you will. Call it Esau.