Showing titles in Spies & Politics

Post-university life doesn’t suit Phyl. Time passes slowly living back home with her parents, working a zero-hour contract serving Japanese food to holidaymakers at Heathrow’s Terminal 5. As for her budding plans of becoming a writer, those are going nowhere. That is, until family friend Chris comes to stay. He’s been on the path to uncover a sinister think-tank, founded at Cambridge University in the 1980s, that’s been scheming to push the British government in a more extreme direction. One that’s finally poised to put their plans into action.

In MI5 a scandal is brewing and there are bad actors everywhere. A key member of a Downing Street think-tank has disappeared without a trace. Claude Whelan, one-time First Desk of MI5's Regent's Park, is tasked with tracking her down. But the trail leads straight back to Regent's Park HQ itself, with its chief, Diana Taverner, as prime suspect. Meanwhile her Russian counterpart has unexpectedly shown up in London but has slipped under MI5's radar.

Nathan Tyler is an unassuming professor at a middling American university with a rather obscure specialty in mathematics—in short, a nobody from nowhere. So why is the White House calling? Summoned to Washington, DC, for a top-secret briefing, Nathan discovers that he’s the key to a massive foreign intelligence breakthrough. Reading between the lines of a cryptic series of equations, he could open a door straight into the heart of the Kremlin and change the global balance of power forever.

MI5 officer David White was always a good father, so when his daughters want to go to a music festival in Israel, he agrees to take them. But his daughters are killed in the Hamas massacre that left 1,400 innocent civilians dead. White is taken hostage down in the tunnels under Gaza and Dan 'Spider' Shepherd and a crack SAS team are sent in to rescue him. Back in London, White is a changed man. He wants revenge for what happened to his family and wants to kill the men who planned and financed the Hamas attacks.

When ex-Royal Marines Commando radio enthusiast Alan King accidentally intercepts a covert communication between a rogue government agency and a kill squad, he unwittingly downloads sensitive information that could expose a conspiracy capable of destabilising the nation. What he initially mistakes for alien communication turns out to be a deadly secret, thrusting him into a world of danger and espionage.

Set over four days against the backdrop of the Munich Conference of September 1938, Munich follows the fortunes of two men who were friends at Oxford together in the 1920s. Hugh Legat is a rising star of the British diplomatic service, serving in 10 Downing Street as a private secretary to the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain. Paul von Hartmann is on the staff of the German Foreign Office - and secretly a member of the anti-Hitler resistance. They have not been in contact for more than a decade.

Slough House is Jackson Lamb’s kingdom; a dumping ground for members of the intelligence service who’ve screwed up: left a secret file on a train, blown surveillance, or become drunkenly unreliable. They’re the service’s poor relations – the slow horses – and bitterest among them is River Cartwright, whose days are spent transcribing mobile phone conversations.

In Berlin, Kurt Müller, an Abwehr signalman, discovers a colleague lying dead at his radio receiver. The criminal police dismiss the death as suicide, but Kurt is not convinced. Kurt follows a trail of mysteries, witnessing several atrocities that expose the Nazi regime for what it truly is. When the trail leads him to the German resistance, he faces the most difficult choices of his life. He must choose between his duty and his conscience, between his country and his family, between love and death.

Buried deep in MI6's digital archives is the most classified directory of all. It doesn't contain war plans or agent profiles, but shame: the misdeeds of politicians, royalty, business leaders and the service's own personnel. There are seven decades' worth of images and recordings, usually acquired for the sake of assessing risk, often engineered by MI6 for their own purposes. They are the most sensitive two thousand terabytes of data in the Service's possession. When material from the archive begins appearing online, panic spreads through the Establishment like wildfire.

1942: a German spy comes ashore on a desolate stretch of Lincolnshire beach. But he is hunted down by a young detective, Richard Prince. The secret services have need of a man like him.... In occupied Europe, Denmark is a hotbed of problems for British intelligence. Rumours of a war-ending weapon being developed by the Germans are rife. Sent to Copenhagen, Prince is soon caught in a deadly game of cat and mouse. Dodging Gestapo agents, SS muscle and the danger of betrayal, his survival - and the war effort - hangs in the balance.

George Smiley, now acting head of the Circus, must rebuild its shattered reputation after one of the biggest betrayals in its history. Using the talents of journalist and occasional spy Jerry Westerby, Smiley launches a risky operation uncovering a Russian money-laundering scheme in the Far East. His aim: revenge on Karla, head of Moscow Centre and the architect of all his troubles.

At Bletchley Park Tom Jericho, a brilliant young codebreaker, is facing a double nightmare. The Germans have unaccountably changed their U-boat Enigma code, threatening a massive Allied defeat. As suspicion grows that there may be a spy inside Bletchley, and Jericho is suspected, his girlfriend, the beautiful and mysterious Claire Romilly, suddenly disappears.

Harry Flashman - the unrepentant bully of Tom Brown’s schooldays, now with a Victoria Cross - has three main talents: horsemanship, facility with foreign languages, and fornication. A reluctant military hero, Flashman plays a key part in most of the defining military campaigns of the 19th century, despite trying his utmost to escape them all. Expelled from Rugby for drunkenness, and none too welcome at home after seducing his father’s mistress, the young Flashman embarks on a military career with Lord Cardigan’s Hussars.

Kate Rees, a young American markswoman, has been recruited by British intelligence to drop into Paris with a dangerous assignment: assassinate the Fuhrer. Wrecked by grief after a Luftwaffe bombing killed her husband and infant daughter, she is armed with a rifle, a vendetta, and a fierce resolve. But other than rushed and rudimentary instruction, she has no formal spy training. Thrust into the red-hot center of the war, a country girl from rural Oregon finds herself holding the fate of the world in her hands.

Master and Commander is the first of Patrick O’Brian’s now famous Aubrey-Maturin novels, regarded by many as the greatest series of historical novels ever written. It establishes the friendship between Captain Jack Aubrey RN and Stephen Maturin, who becomes his secretive ship’s surgeon and an intelligence agent. It displays the qualities which have put O’Brian far ahead of any of his competitors.

Set in an exciting world of criminal masterminds, espionage and adventure, the adventures of special agent Dick Barton and his friends Jock and Snowey were essential listening for an entire generation. Originally running on the BBC Light Programme between 1946 and 1951, few of the BBC's original recordings still survive. However, in 1949 a number of early Barton tales were rerecorded for transmission overseas starring Douglas Kelly.

Monochrome is a busted flush - an inquiry into the misdeeds of the intelligence services, established by a vindictive prime minister but rendered toothless by a wily chief spook. For years it has ground away uselessly, interviewing witnesses with nothing to offer, producing a report with nothing to say, while the civil servants at its helm see their careers disappearing into a black hole. And then the OTIS file falls into their hands. What secrets does this hold that see a long-redundant spy being chased through Devon's green lanes in the dark?

Smiley, wrestling with retirement and disillusionment, is summoned to a secret meeting with a member of the Cabinet Office. Evidence has emerged that the Circus has been infiltrated at the highest level by a Russian agent. 'Find the mole, George. Clean the stables. Do whatever is necessary.' Reluctantly Smiley agrees, and so embarks on a dark journey into his past a past filled with love, duplicity and betrayal.

A storm is on the horizon. America’s days are numbered. A Chinese submarine has gone rogue and is navigating towards the continental United States, putting its nuclear missiles within striking distance of the West Coast. A rising Silicon Valley tech mogul with unknown allegiances is at the forefront of a revolution in quantum computing and Artificial Intelligence. A politician controlled by a foreign power is a breath away from the Oval Office. Three seemingly disconnected events are on a collision course to ignite a power grab unlike anything the world has ever seen.

Following his brutal quest for revenge, former Navy SEAL James Reece has fled the United States, emerging deep in the wilds of Mozambique. But he can’t stay hidden for long – when a string of horrific terrorist attacks plagues the Western world, the CIA tracks him down and recruits him.

To some he was Orphan X. Others knew him as the Nowhere Man. But to veteran spymaster Jack Johns, he was a boy named Evan Smoak. Taken from an orphanage, Evan was raised inside a top secret programme designed to turn him into a deadly weapon. Jack became his instructor, mentor, teacher and guardian. Because for all the dangerous skills he instilled in his young charge, he also cared for Evan like a son. And now Jack needs Evan’s help....

Here in Slough House, the intelligence service's home for inept spies, it's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas. Roddy Ho is used to being the one the slow horses turn to when they need miracles performed, and he's always been Jackson Lamb's Number Two. So when Lamb has a photograph that needs doctoring, it's Ho he entrusts with the task. Christmas is a time for memories, but Lamb doesn't do memories—or so he says. But what is it about the photo that makes him want to alter it? How would the slow horses cope if Roddy Ho didn't exist?

Accompanied by his trusty sidekicks, Pete Pienaar, John S. Blenkiron and Sandy Arbuthnot, Richard travels across war-torn Europe searching for a man with a secret. A prophet by reputation, the man possesses key information that could guarantee British victory, and he goes by the name of Greenmantle.

Perry Stuart is a TV meteorologist who routinely works before the cameras. His life calm and ordered, his face familiar to every British household, Stuart's profound weather knowledge and accuracy have given him high status among forecasters, but no physical baptism by storm. Not, that is, until a fellow forecaster offers him a Caribbean hurricane-chasing ride in a small aeroplane.

Peter Guillam, staunch colleague and disciple of George Smiley of the British Secret Service, is living out his old age on the family farmstead in Brittany when a letter summons him to London. The reason? His Cold War past has come back to claim him. Intelligence operations that were once the toast of secret London and involved such characters as Alec Leamas, Jim Prideaux, George Smiley and Peter Guillam himself are to be scrutinised under disturbing criteria by a generation with no memory of the Cold War.

Fatherland is set in an alternative world where Hitler has won the Second World War. It is April 1964 and one week before Hitler's 75th birthday. Xavier March, a detective of the Kriminalpolizei, is called out to investigate the discovery of a dead body in a lake near Berlin's most prestigious suburb. As March discovers the identity of the body, he uncovers signs of a conspiracy that could go to the very top of the German Reich.

CIA case officer Sam Joseph is dispatched to Paris to recruit Syrian Palace official Mariam Haddad. The two fall into a forbidden relationship, which supercharges Haddad's recruitment and creates unspeakable danger when they enter Damascus to find the man responsible for the disappearance of an American spy.

The life-and-death hunt for a notorious Nazi criminal unfolds against a background of international arms deals. As the story leads to its final dramatic confrontation on a bleak winter's hill-top, the question every reader asked at the end of The Day of the Jackal will inevitably be asked again: Can this be fiction?

An elderly woman of striking beauty is found murdered in Orleans, France. Her identity has been cleverly erased, but the method of her death is very specific: she has been killed in the manner of traitors to the Resistance in World War Two. Tracking down her murderer leads police inspector Inès Picaut back to 1940s France, where the men and women of the Resistance were engaged in a desperate fight for survival against the Nazi invaders.

Some agents have all the fun. Others save the world. Bob Howard is an IT expert and occasional field agent for The Laundry, the branch of Her Majesty's Secret Service that deals with occult threats. Dressed (grudgingly) in a tux and sent to the Caribbean, he must infiltrate a millionaire's yacht in order to prevent him violating a treaty that will start a war with an ancient underwater race.