WANTED: Gainful employment of an adventurous nature but without risk of personal physical harm. (Can supply own time travel machine if required.) When Horace Tweed places an advertisement in a national magazine, the last thing he expects is to be commissioned to travel back through time in search of the long extinct Holey Snail. But this isn't just any old snail. The helix pertusa is possessed of an extraordinary and highly desirable property, and Horace's quest leads him and his co-adventurers to Ancient Greece and a variety of near-death encounters with beings both mythological and not so mythological. Meanwhile, Detective Chief Inspector Harper Collins has her hands full trying to track down a secret order of fundamentalist monks whom she suspects of committing a series of murders - the same monks who are determined to thwart Horace in his... ...Quest for the Holey Snail. "Not just another book about serial-killing monks who travel through time and wear Union Jack flip-flops." - Unusual Footwear Monthly