Instrusion is the first in a series of novels called “Theological thrillers.”

 

It begins in a London courtroom, where Judge Carter Braxton is ending a trail, when a woman appears that he knows but has not seen recently, as he has been safehoused from assassins of an oil bunker middleman he sentenced to prison; the safehouse is provided by Sidi el Hassam, an Arab whose vocation is stopping oil bunkering. The woman is Valerie Falconer, the widow of his late best friend, and the family business of providing royal oak is in peril, but a solution is beginning to take place.

        

  As the novel progresses, Braxton is tired of his seclusion, and Valerie’s father, Roulon Harrington, a Texas rancher with oil interests, meets the Sidi and offers an abandoned house on his ranch to draw out the assassins.  They accept. Carter and Valerie are shipped out of England on RAF transport airplane. En route, Valerie falls asleep while a test of re-fueling the large transport is undertaken, and Carter fears he is going to die as the fueling plane draws closer. For the first time in his life he thinks of what may happen to him when he dies, the beginning of his conversion experience, which sees him baptized by Jack Tottle, the local minister.

         

The Sidi sets up a team in the house loaned to them and await the assassins finding them. When they do, a clever ambush finishes off the assassins. Back at the ranch, Valerie is called to the aid of a local family who is receiving a spectral obituary on their television, which means someone has cursed them to death, and Carter goes with Valerie to observer her deal with the threat. Carter proposes to Valerie, who is incredulous, as when younger he had been a variety man, but they argue but eventually work things out, are married, and return to London, where they see the Sidi off to undertake telling people about the Marian apparition of El-Zeitoun—our Lady of Zeitoun.