Books by John Lawton

Old Flames

by John Lawton

Brilliantly evoking the intrigue of the Cold War and 1950s London, John LawtonÂ's thrilling sequel to Black Out takes Inspector Troy deep into the rotten heart of MI6, the distant days of his childhood, and the dangerous arms of an old flame: Larissa Tosca, late of the U.S. Army, later still of the KGB. It is April 1956, and an official visit to Britain by Soviet leaders Khrushchev and Bulganin is unexpectedly interrupted when a mutilated body is found under the hull of KhrushchevÂ's ship in Portsmouth Harbor. Is the dead man a Royal Navy diver or the corpse of Arnold Cockerell, a furniture salesman with a mysterious source of income? As the mystery deepens, the inexplicable murders continue, leading Troy to an unforgettable discovery.

Black Out

by John Lawton, Lisa Unger

Investigating a series of brutal murders that target German refugee scientists as a means of cracking the Nazi atomic rocketry program, young Detective Sergeant Frederick Troy becomes enmeshed in a conspiracy by the OSS. A first novel. Reprint.

Black Out

by John Lawton, Lisa Unger

A Today Show Top Ten Pick

A Florida Book Award Winner

Shortlisted for Prix Polar International Award for Best Book

"A hurricane of a thriller." (Entertainment Weekly)

"Harrowing psychological suspense." (People)

"Riveting psychological suspense of the first order. If you haven't yet experienced Lisa Unger, what are you waiting for?" (Harlan Coben)

On the surface, Annie Powers's life in a wealthy Florida beach neighborhood is happy and idyllic. Her husband, Gray, loves her fiercely; together, they dote on their beautiful young daughter, Victory. But the bubble surrounding Annie is pricked when she senses that the demons of her past have resurfaced and, to her horror, are now creeping up on her. These are demons she can't fully recall because of a highly dissociative state that allowed her to forget. Disturbing events trigger strange and confusing memories for Annie, who realizes she has to quickly piece them together before her past comes to claim her future...and her daughter.

Bluffing Mr. Churchill

by John Lawton

In 1941, the sheltered Calvin M. Cormack teams up with Walter Stilton, a rowdy MI5 officer, to find Wolfgang Stahl, an American spy masquerading as an SS officer, who flees Germany with valuable information on Hitler's plans to invade Russia, but Cormack must enlist the aid of Sergeant Troy of Scotland Yard after his partner turns up dead. Reprint.

Flesh Wounds (The Inspector Troy Novels (3))

by John Lawton

When an old love returns into Troy's life, the Scotland Yard investigator finds himself embroiled in American politics when he agrees to help his old lover, who is currently the wife of a presidential candidate. By the author of Old Flames.

A Little White Death (The Inspector Troy Novels, 4)

by John Lawton

The latest novel from the master spy novelist John Lawton follows Inspector Troy, now Scotland Yard’s chief detective, deep into a scandal reminiscent of the infamous Profumo affair. England in 1963 is a country set to explode. The old guard, shocked by the habits of the war baby youth — sex, drugs, and rock and roll — sets out to fight back. The battle moves uncomfortably close to Chief Inspector Troy. While Troy is on medical leave for a nasty case of tuberculosis, the Yard brings charges against an acquaintance of his, a hedonistic doctor with a penchant for voyeurism and uninhibited young women. Two of these women just happen to be sleeping with a senior man at the Foreign Office and a KGB agent. But on the eve of the verdict a curious double case of suicide drags Troy back into active duty. Beyond bedroom acrobatics, the secret affairs now stretch to double-crosses and backroom deals in the halls of Parliament, not to mention murder. It’s all Troy can do, fighting off some bad habits of his own, to stay afloat in a country immersed in drugs and up to its neck in scandal.

Then We Take Berlin: A Joel Wilderness Novel (The Joe Wilderness Novels, 1)

by John Lawton

Joe Wilderness is a World War II orphan, a condition that he thinks excuses him from common morality. Cat burglar, card sharp, and Cockney wide boy, the last thing he wants is to get drafted. But in 1946 he finds himself in the Royal Air Force, facing a stretch in military prison . . . when along comes Lt Colonel Burne-Jones to tell him MI6 has better use for his talents.

Posted to occupied Berlin, interrogating ex-Nazis, and burgling the odd apartment for MI6, Wilderness finds himself with time on his hands and the devil making work. He falls in with Frank, a US Army captain, with Eddie, a British artilleryman and with Yuri, a major in the NKVD and together they lift the black market scam to a new level. Coffee never tasted so sweet. And he falls for Nell Breakheart, a German girl who has witnessed the worst that Germany could do and is driven by all the scruples that Wilderness lacks.

Fifteen years later, June 1963. Wilderness is free-lance and down on his luck. A gumshoe scraping by on divorce cases. Frank is a big shot on Madison Avenue, cooking up one last Berlin scam . . . for which he needs Wilderness once more. Only now they're not smuggling coffee, they're smuggling people. And Nell? Nell is on the staff of West Berlin's mayor Willy Brandt, planning for the state visit of the most powerful man in the world: "Ich bin ein Berliner!"

Then We Take Berlin is a gripping, meticulously researched and richly detailed historical thriller – a moving story of espionage and war, and people caught up in the most tumultuous events of the twenty-first century.

Sweet Sunday: A Novel

by John Lawton

Turner Raines is not a typical New York private eye. He'd tell you so much himself, "I may not be the greatest gumshoe alive, but I'm a good listener." He is a has-been—among the things he has been are a broken Civil Rights worker, a second-rate lawyer, and a tenth-rate journalist. But as a detective, he's found his niche. In the summer of 1969—the hottest, sweatiest in history, the American summer in the American year in the American century—the USA is about to land a man on the moon, and the Vietnam War is set to continue to rip the country to pieces, setting sons against fathers, fathers against sons. If your kid dodges the draft, hooks up with a hippie commune, makes a dash for Canada, Turner Raines is the man to find him. He won't drag him back, that's not the deal, but he will put you in touch with your loved one.

That turbulent May of 1969, as Norman Mailer runs for Mayor of New York, Raines leaves the city, chasing a draft-dodging punk all the way to Toronto. Nothing goes as planned. By the time Raines gets back to New York, his oldest friend is dead, the city has changed for ever, and with it, his life. Following the trail of his friend's death, he finds himself blasted back to the Texas of his childhood, confronted anew with the unresolved issues of his divided family, and blown into the path of certain people who know about secret goings-on in Vietnam, stories they may now be willing to tell. Lucky for Raines, he's a good listener.

Then We Take Berlin (The Joe Wilderness Novels, 1)

by John Lawton

Joe Wilderness is a World War II orphan, a condition that he thinks excuses him from common morality. Cat burglar, card sharp, and Cockney wide boy, the last thing he wants is to get drafted. But in 1946 he finds himself in the Royal Air Force, facing a stretch in military prison . . . when along comes Lt Colonel Burne-Jones to tell him MI6 has better use for his talents.

Posted to occupied Berlin, interrogating ex-Nazis, and burgling the odd apartment for MI6, Wilderness finds himself with time on his hands and the devil making work. He falls in with Frank, a US Army captain, with Eddie, a British artilleryman and with Yuri, a major in the NKVD and together they lift the black market scam to a new level. Coffee never tasted so sweet. And he falls for Nell Breakheart, a German girl who has witnessed the worst that Germany could do and is driven by all the scruples that Wilderness lacks.

Fifteen years later, June 1963. Wilderness is free-lance and down on his luck. A gumshoe scraping by on divorce cases. Frank is a big shot on Madison Avenue, cooking up one last Berlin scam . . . for which he needs Wilderness once more. Only now they're not smuggling coffee, they're smuggling people. And Nell? Nell is on the staff of West Berlin's mayor Willy Brandt, planning for the state visit of the most powerful man in the world: "Ich bin ein Berliner!"

Then We Take Berlin is a gripping, meticulously researched and richly detailed historical thriller – a moving story of espionage and war, and people caught up in the most tumultuous events of the twenty-first century.

The Unfortunate Englishman: A Joe Wilderness Novel (The Joe Wilderness Novels, 2)

by John Lawton

Having shot someone in what he believed was self-defense in the chaos of 1963 Berlin, Wilderness finds himself locked up with little chance of escape. But an official pardon through his father-in-law Burne-Jones, a senior agent at MI6, means he is free to go—although forever in Burne-Jones’s service. His newest operation will take him back to Berlin, which is now the dividing line between the West and the Soviets. A backstory of innocence and intrigue unravels, one in which Wilderness is in and out of Berlin and Vienna like a jack-in-the-box. When the Russians started building the Berlin wall in 1961, two unfortunate Englishmen were trapped on opposite sides. Geoffrey Masefield in the Lubyanka, and Bernard Alleyn (alias KGB Captain Leonid Liubimov) in Wormwood Scrubs. In 1965 there is a new plan. To exchange the prisoners, a swap upon Berlin's bridge of spies. But, as ever, Joe has something on the side, just to make it interesting, just to make it profitable. The Unfortunate Englishman is a thrilling tale of Khrushchev, Kennedy, a spy exchange . . . and ten thousand bottles of fine Bordeaux. What can possibly go wrong?

The Unfortunate Englishman: A Joe Wilderness Novel (The Joe Wilderness Novels, 2)

by John Lawton

Berlin, 1963. East End-Londoner turned spy Joe Wilderness has had better days. He is sitting in a West Berlin jail, arrested for shooting someone he thought was about to kill him. His old boss, Lieutenant Burne-Jones of MI6, comes to Berlin to free him, but only under the condition that he rejoin British Intelligence. The knowledge that Wilderness gained of Berlin’s underworld while working the black market just after World War II will prove useful to Queen and country now that the city has become the epicenter of the Cold War, dividing the world in two with its wall.

On the other side of the Iron Curtain, another MI6 man, Geoffrey Masefield, is ruing the day he first agreed to be a spy. In the beginning, it had all seemed so simple, so glamorous: the international travel, the top secret files, the vodka, the women. . . . But now Masefield is stuck in Lubyanka, the KGB’s Moscow prison, waiting for a lifeline from his former employer. Meanwhile, over in England, a Russian spy is pining for his homeland. Having lived as Bernard Forbes Campbell Alleyn for years and taken a wife and had two daughters under that alias, he’s now been exposed as KGB Captain Leonid Liubimov. Arrested for treason and then for espionage, he is in prison at Wormwood Scrubs, London. The only ticket out for these two men is a spy exchange.

Posted back to Berlin, Wilderness is to oversee the exchange of Masefield and Liubimov, but his black market nous hasn’t diminished. There’s money to be made and ten thousand bottles of fine Bordeaux that Wilderness hasn’t forgotten about. A brilliantly evocative novel from a writer regularly compared to John le Carré, The Unfortunate Englishman is a gripping tale of Cold War espionage, and the best laid plans of unfortunate men.

Friends and Traitors (The Inspector Troy Novels, 8)

by John Lawton

London, 1958. Chief Superintendent Frederick Troy of Scotland Yard―newly promoted after good service during Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to Britain―is not looking forward to a European trip with his older brother, Rod. Rod has decided to take his entire family on “the Grand Tour” for his fifty-first birthday: a whirlwind of restaurants, galleries, and concert halls from Paris to Florence to Vienna to Amsterdam. But in Vienna, Frederick Troy crosses paths with an old acquaintance: British-spy-turned-Soviet-agent Guy Burgess, who makes an extraordinary confession: “I want to come home.” Troy knows this news will cause a ruckus in London, but he doesn’t expect that an MI5 man will gunned down as a result―and Troy himself suspected of the crime. As he fights to prove his innocence, Troy finds that Burgess is not the only ghost who has returned to haunt him. Richly atmospheric and full of twists and turns, Friends and Traitors will satisfy John Lawton’s many fans and win him new ones as well.

Friends and Traitors (The Inspector Troy Novels, 8)

by John Lawton

John Lawton’s Inspector Troy novels are regularly singled out as a crime series of exceptional quality, by critics and readers alike. Friends and Traitors is the eighth novel in the series―which can be read in any order―a story of betrayal, espionage, and the dangers of love.

London, 1958. Chief Superintendent Frederick Troy of Scotland Yard, newly promoted after good service during Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to Britain, is not looking forward to a European trip with his older brother, Rod. Rod has decided to take his entire family on “the Grand Tour” for his fifty-first birthday: a whirlwind of restaurants, galleries, and concert halls from Paris to Florence to Vienna to Amsterdam. But Frederick Troy only gets as far as Vienna. It is there that he crosses paths with an old acquaintance, a man who always seems to be followed by trouble: British spy turned Soviet agent Guy Burgess. Suffice it to say that Troy is more than surprised when Burgess, who has escaped from the bosom of Moscow for a quick visit to Vienna, tells him something extraordinary: “I want to come home.” Troy knows this news will cause a ruckus in London―but even Troy doesn’t expect an MI5 man to be gunned down as a result, and Troy himself suspected of doing the deed. As he fights to prove his innocence, Troy is haunted by more than just Burgess’s past liaisons―there is a scandal that goes up to the highest ranks of Westminster, affecting spooks and politicians alike. And the stakes become all the higher for Troy when he reencounters a woman he first met in the Ritz hotel during a blackout―falling in love is a handicap when playing the game of spies.

A Little White Death: An Inspector Troy Thriller (The Inspector Troy Novels, 3)

by John Lawton

The latest novel from the master spy novelist John Lawton follows Inspector Troy, now Scotland Yard’s chief detective, deep into a scandal reminiscent of the infamous Profumo affair.
England in 1963 is a country set to explode. The old guard, shocked by the habits of the war baby youth, sets out to fight back. The battle reaches uncomfortably close to Troy. While he is on medical leave, the Yard brings charges against an acquaintance of his, a hedonistic doctor with a penchant for voyeurism and young women, two of whom just happen to be sleeping with a senior man at the Foreign Office as well as a KGB agent.
But on the eve of the verdict a curious double case of suicide drags Troy back into active duty. Beyond bedroom acrobatics, the secret affairs now stretch to double crosses and deals in the halls of power, not to mention murder. It’s all Troy can do to stay afloat in a country immersed in drugs, up to its neck in scandal.

Flesh Wounds: An Inspector Troy Novel (The Inspector Troy Novels)

by John Lawton

Praised for their riveting, ingenious plot twists, John Lawton's series of espionage thrillers featuring Chief Inspector Frederick Troy of Scotland Yard have an uncanny ability to place readers in the thick of history. Now in Flesh Wounds, an old flame has returned to Troy's life: Kitty Stilton, wife of an American presidential hopeful. Private eye Joey Rork has been hired to make sure Kitty's amorous liaisons with a rat pack crooner don't ruin her husband's political career. But he also wants to know why Kitty has been spotted with Danny Ryan, whose twin brothers, in addition to owning one of London's hottest jazz clubs, are said to have inherited the crime empire of fallen mobster Alf Marx. Before Rork can find out, he meets a gruesome end. And he isn't the only one: bodies have started turning up around London, dismembered in the same bizarre and horrifying way. Is it possible that the blood trail leads back to Troy's own police force and into Troy's own forgotten past? Flesh Wounds, a compulsively readable thriller, finds one of our most able storytellers at the height of his game.

Moscow Exile: A Joe Wilderness Novel (The Joe Wilderness Novels, 5)

by John Lawton

From “quite possibly the best historical novelist we have” (Philadelphia Inquirer), the fourth Joe Wilderness spy thriller, moving from Red Scare-era Washington, D.C. to a KGB prison near Moscow’s Kremlin
In Moscow Exile, John Lawton departs from his usual stomping grounds of England and Germany to jump across the Atlantic to Washington, D.C., in the fragile postwar period where the Red Scare is growing noisier every day.
Charlotte is a British expatriate who has recently settled in the nation’s capital with her second husband, a man who looks intriguingly like Clark Gable, but her enviable dinner parties and soirées aren’t the only things she is planning. Meanwhile, Charlie Leigh-Hunt has been posted to Washington as a replacement for Guy Burgess, last seen disappearing around the corner and into the Soviet Union. Charlie is soon shocked to cross paths with Charlotte, an old flame of his, who, thanks to all her gossipy parties, has a packed pocketbook full of secrets she is eager to share. Two decades or so later, in 1969, Joe Wilderness is stuck on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, held captive by the KGB, a chip in a game way above his pay grade—but his old friends Frank and Eddie are going to try to spring him out of the toughest prison in the world. All roads lead back to Berlin, and to the famous Bridge of Spies…
Featuring crackling dialogue, brilliantly plotted Cold War intrigue, and the return of beloved characters, including Inspector Troy, Moscow Exile is a gripping thriller populated by larger-than-life personalities in a Cold War plot that feels strangely in tune with our present.

Moscow Exile: A Joe Wilderness Novel (The Joe Wilderness Novels, 5)

by John Lawton

From “quite possibly the best historical novelist we have” (Philadelphia Inquirer), the fourth Joe Wilderness spy thriller, moving from Red Scare-era Washington, D.C. to a KGB prison near Moscow’s Kremlin
In Moscow Exile, John Lawton departs from his usual stomping grounds of England and Germany to jump across the Atlantic to Washington, D.C., in the fragile postwar period where the Red Scare is growing noisier every day.
Charlotte is a British expatriate who has recently settled in the nation’s capital with her second husband, a man who looks intriguingly like Clark Gable, but her enviable dinner parties and soirées aren’t the only things she is planning. Meanwhile, Charlie Leigh-Hunt has been posted to Washington as a replacement for Guy Burgess, last seen disappearing around the corner and into the Soviet Union. Charlie is soon shocked to cross paths with Charlotte, an old flame of his, who, thanks to all her gossipy parties, has a packed pocketbook full of secrets she is eager to share. Two decades or so later, in 1969, Joe Wilderness is stuck on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, held captive by the KGB, a chip in a game way above his pay grade—but his old friends Frank and Eddie are going to try to spring him out of the toughest prison in the world. All roads lead back to Berlin, and to the famous Bridge of Spies…
Featuring crackling dialogue, brilliantly plotted Cold War intrigue, and the return of beloved characters, including Inspector Troy, Moscow Exile is a gripping thriller populated by larger-than-life personalities in a Cold War plot that feels strangely in tune with our present.

Second Violin: An Inspector Troy Thriller (The Inspector Troy Novels, 6)

by John Lawton

One of today’s top historical espionage writers, considered “as good as Le Carré” (Chicago Tribune) and “a master” (Rocky Mountain News), John Lawton adds another spellbinding thriller to his Inspector Troy series with Second Violin. The sixth installment in the series, Lawton’s new novel opens in 1938 with Europe on the brink of war. In London, Frederick Troy, newly promoted to the prestigious murder squad at Scotland Yard, is put in charge of rounding up a list of German and Italian “enemy aliens” that also includes Frederick’s brother, Rod, who learns upon receiving an internment letter that he was born in Austria despite having grown up in England. Hundreds of men are herded by train to a neglected camp on the Isle of Man. And as the bombs start falling on London, a murdered rabbi is found, then another, and another. Amid great war, murder is what matters. Moving from the Nazi-infested alleys of prewar Vienna to the bombed-out streets of 1940 London, and featuring an extraordinary cast of characters, Lawton’s latest thriller is a suspenseful and intelligent novel, as good a spy story as it is an historical narrative.

Old Flames: An Inspector Troy Thriller (The Inspector Troy Novels, 2)

by John Lawton

In April 1956, at the height of the Cold War, Khrushchev and Bulganin, leaders of the Soviet Union, are in Britain on an official visit. Chief Inspector Troy of Scotland Yard is assigned to be Khrushchev's bodyguard and to spy on him. Soon after, a Royal Navy diver is found dead and mutilated beyond recognition in Portsmouth Harbor. Troy embarks on an investigation that takes him to the rotten heart of MI6, to the distant days of his childhood, and into the dangerous arms of an old flame. Brilliantly evoking the intrigue of the Cold War and 1950's London, Old Flames is a thrilling adventure of intrigue and suspense.

A Lily of the Field: An Inspector Troy Novel (The Inspector Troy Novels, 7)

by John Lawton

Spanning the tumultuous years 1934 to 1948, John Lawton's A Lily of the Field is a brilliant historical thriller from a master of the form. The book follows two characters—Méret Voytek, a talented young cellist living in Vienna at the novel's start, and Dr. Karel Szabo, a Hungarian physicist interned in a camp on the Isle of Man. In his seventh Inspector Troy novel, Lawton moves seamlessly from Vienna and Auschwitz to the deserts of New Mexico and the rubble-strewn streets of postwar London, following the fascinating parallels of the physicist Szabo and musician Voytek as fate takes each far from home and across the untraditional battlefields of a destructive war to an unexpected intersection at the novel's close. The result, A Lily of the Field, is Lawton's best book yet, an historically accurate and remarkably written novel that explores the diaspora or two Europeans from the rise of Hitler to the post-atomic age.

Black Out: An Inspector Troy Thriller (The Inspector Troy Novels, 1)

by John Lawton

John Lawton’s debut novel—first published by Viking in 1995, and now being reissued by Grove Press—is a stunning, war-time thriller that cements his place among the greatest crime writers of our era. The first of the Inspector Troy novels, Black Out singularly captures the realities of wartime London, weaving them into a riveting drama that encapsulates the uncertainty of Europe at the dawn of the postwar era.

London, 1944. While the Luftwaffe makes its final assault on the already battered British capital, Londoners rush through the streets, seeking underground shelter in the midst of the city’s black out. When the panic subsides, other things begin to surface along with London’s war-worn citizens. A severed arm is discovered by a group of children playing at an East End bomb site, and when Scotland Yard’s Dective Sergeant Frederick Troy arrives at the scene, it becomes apparent that the dismembered body is not the work of a V-1 rocket. After Troy manages to link the severed arm to the disappearance of a refugee scientist form Nazi Germany, America’s newest intelligence agency, the OSS, decides to get involved. The son of a titled Russian émigré, Troy is forced to leave the London he knows and enter a corrupt world of bloody consequences, stateless refugees, and mysterious women as he unearths a chain of secrets leading straight to the Allied high command.

Hammer to Fall (The Joe Wilderness Novels, 3)

by John Lawton

The third Joe Wilderness spy thriller from a master of the genre, moving from icy Finland to tumultuous Cold War Prague, Hammer to Fall is a tale of vodka smuggling and a legendary female Red Army general who is playing a dangerous game

It’s London, the swinging sixties, and by all rights MI6 spy Joe Wilderness should be having as good a time as James Bond. But alas, his postings are more grim than glamorous. Luckily, Wilderness has a knack for doing well for himself even in the most unpromising postings, though this has gotten him into hot water in the past. A coffee-smuggling gig in divided Berlin was a steady money-maker but things went pear-shaped when he had to smuggle a spy back to the KGB instead. In the wake of what became an embarrassing disaster for MI6, Wilderness is reprimanded with a posting to remote northern Finland, under the guise of a cultural exchange program to promote Britain abroad. Bored by his work, with nothing to spy on, Wilderness finds another way to make money, this time by smuggling vodka across the rather porous border into the USSR. He strikes a deal with his old KGB pal Kostya, who explains to him there is, no joke, a vodka shortage in the Soviet Union, following a grain famine caused by Khrushchev’s new agricultural policies. But there is something fishy about why Kostya has suddenly turned up in Finland―and MI6 intelligence from London points to a connection to the mining of cobalt in the region, a critical component in the casing of the atomic bomb. Wilderness’s posting is getting more interesting by the minute, but more dangerous too.

Moving from the no-man’s-land of Cold War Finland to the wild days of the Prague Spring, and populated by old friends (including Inspector Troy) and old enemies alike, Hammer to Fall is a gripping tale of deception and skullduggery, of art and politics, a page-turning story of the always riveting life of the British spy.

Hammer to Fall (The Joe Wilderness Novels, 3)

by John Lawton

The third Joe Wilderness spy thriller from a master of the genre, moving from icy Finland to tumultuous Cold War Prague, Hammer to Fall is a tale of vodka smuggling and a legendary female Red Army general who is playing a dangerous game

It’s London, the swinging sixties, and by all rights MI6 spy Joe Wilderness should be having as good a time as James Bond. But alas, his postings are more grim than glamorous. Luckily, Wilderness has a knack for doing well for himself even in the most unpromising postings, though this has gotten him into hot water in the past. A coffee-smuggling gig in divided Berlin was a steady money-maker but things went pear-shaped when he had to smuggle a spy back to the KGB instead. In the wake of what became an embarrassing disaster for MI6, Wilderness is reprimanded with a posting to remote northern Finland, under the guise of a cultural exchange program to promote Britain abroad. Bored by his work, with nothing to spy on, Wilderness finds another way to make money, this time by smuggling vodka across the rather porous border into the USSR. He strikes a deal with his old KGB pal Kostya, who explains to him there is, no joke, a vodka shortage in the Soviet Union, following a grain famine caused by Khrushchev’s new agricultural policies. But there is something fishy about why Kostya has suddenly turned up in Finland―and MI6 intelligence from London points to a connection to the mining of cobalt in the region, a critical component in the casing of the atomic bomb. Wilderness’s posting is getting more interesting by the minute, but more dangerous too.

Moving from the no-man’s-land of Cold War Finland to the wild days of the Prague Spring, and populated by old friends (including Inspector Troy) and old enemies alike, Hammer to Fall is a gripping tale of deception and skullduggery, of art and politics, a page-turning story of the always riveting life of the British spy.

Bluffing Mr. Churchill (The Inspector Troy Novels, 2)

by John Lawton

In 1941, the sheltered Calvin M. Cormack teams up with Walter Stilton, a rowdy MI5 officer, to find Wolfgang Stahl, an American spy masquerading as an SS officer, who flees Germany with valuable information on Hitler's plans to invade Russia, but Cormack must enlist the aid of Sergeant Troy of Scotland Yard after his partner turns up dead. 35,000 first printing.

Ink and Daggers

by Neil Gaiman, John Lawton, Ken Bruen, George Pelecanos, Christopher Fowler, James Sallis, Max Allan Collins, Mickey Spillane, Conrad Williams, Stuart Neville, Ann Cleeves, Lavie Tidhar, Simon Brett, Christine Poulson

An enthralling anthology of 20 CWA Dagger Award-shortlisted gripping and thrilling stories for the most hardened crime fan.

Featuring bestselling authors such as Ann Cleeves, Christopher Fowler and Val McDermid.

NINETEEN CWA DAGGER AWARD-WINNING SHORT STORIES FROM THE BEST OF THE BEST IN CRIME FICTION


Legendary editor, Maxim Jakubowski, delivers another chilling anthology collecting stories of cold-blooded murder, revenge and crimes-gone-wrong from the best of the best in crime fiction. Spine-chilling and gripping, these tales will grip you with their devious narrators and crafty twists.

FEATURING:


Ann Cleeves
Christopher Fowler
Val McDermid
Lavie Tidhar
Chris Simms
Christine Poulson
James Sallis
Victoria Selman
Conrad Williams
Stuart Neville
George Pelecanos
Simon Brett
John Lawton
Ken Bruen
Mickey Spillane & Max Allan Collins
Peter Robinson
Martyn Waites
and
Kevin Wignall

Smoke and Embers An Inspector Troy Novel

by John Lawton

From "one of the best authors of espionage fiction" (Wall Street Journal), a book of deception and money to be made amid the rubble of World War II

From an author whose books have been described as "one of the great pleasures of modern spy fiction" by Slow Horses author Mick Herron and compared to the works of Alan Furst, Phillip Kerr, and Joseph Kanon, in Smoke and Embers John Lawton turns to the murky days, weeks and years following the end of World War II in Germany, Britain, and beyond.

Smoke and Embers is the ninth installment of the beloved Inspector Troy series, and opens in 1950, when Scotland Yard Chief Inspector Troy learns that his sergeant has been conducting an affair with the known mistress of infamous London racketeer Otto Ohnherz. Troy is immediately intrigued by the mysterious origins of Ohnherz's second-in-command, Jay Fabian, who is a major contributor to all three British political parties and claims to have survived the concentration camps--yet he lacks proof beyond his word. So begins a novel of duplicity and reinvention in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust, with each chapter adding a new layer of intrigue.

With a twisting plotline, crackling dialogue, characteristic humor, and the return of beloved characters, Smoke and Embers is an exciting new addition to John Lawton's masterful canon.