a retired spy has buried his past. but the past is a poor gardener.michael ward is a ghost, a former intelligence officer living a life of quiet penance on the windswept coast of northumberland. he is a man who has traded the grand, violent certainties of his old life for the small, fragile peace of a quiet retirement.but when a shadowy, data-driven foundation known as the iifsd (international institute for fiscal and social development) begins to poison the institutions and people of his new home, michael is drawn back into a war he never wanted to fight. the enemy is not a rogue state but a far more insidious threat: a corporation that believes humanity is a problem to be managed and that compassion is a variable to be controlled.to fight an enemy that operates in the bright, open, and entirely plausible spaces of modern life, michael must assemble a pack of his own fellow ghosts: a cynical art dealer with a hidden, noble heart; a quiet scholar who can read the lies in ancient texts; a consecrated killer seeking a new and better faith; and the quiet, steady women who become the true and formidable heart of their resistance.from their unlikely sanctuary in an old customs house, they begin their war. it is a war fought not with bullets, but with whispers; not with armies, but with a stubborn and necessary belief in the power of a few good people to stand against a beautiful and hollow lie. studies in red is the first volume in the woven chord, a story for those who have been erased-and for those who choose to remember.