About the title
Michael Bryce was a top-class bodyguard until his first client was killed. Now he is forced to shield the bodies of private individuals in some European backwater for a modest fee. Michael gets a chance to return to the elite: all he has to do is escort his greatest mortal enemy, the notorious killer Darius Kincaid, from Coventry, England, to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, and not die along with his charge on the way. The problem isn't even that Darius is the star witness for the prosecution in the case against Eastern European dictator-president Dukhovich, accused of mass genocide of his country's population and potato-related schemes. Nor is it that they must reach the court within 24 hours, fighting their way through a line of vicious armed men. Due to their professional deformations, the bodyguard and the killer harbor the "tenderest feelings" for each other and seriously risk killing, dismembering, and burning their partner in a fit of mutual passion.