The thrilling third novel from multi-award-nominated author Adam Brookes is paranoid, tense spy fiction at its very finest. Meet Pearl Tao: an American girl with a lethal secret. Pearl longs for the life of a normal American teenager: summers at the pool, friends, backyard barbecues in the Washington DC suburbs. But she is different. Her gift for mathematics means overprotective parents and college sponsorship from a secretive technology corporation. And now, aged nineteen, she is beginning to understand what her parents intend for her. The terrifying role she is to play. Her only hope of escape lies with two sidelined and discredited spies: Trish Patterson and Philip Mangan. Finding out the truth about Pearl will be the biggest mission they'll ever undertake. "Authentic, taut and compelling. Brookes is the real deal." Charles Cumming
In a world of lies, one man wants the truth.
Journalist Philip Mangan is trying to stay out of trouble in East Africa, his reputation and his life in tatters. But when he is caught in a terrorist attack in East Africa and a shadowy Chinese figure approaches him in the dead of night with information on the origins of the attack, Mangan is suddenly back in the eye of the storm.
Meanwhile, thousands of miles away on a humid Hong Kong night, a key British Intelligence source is murdered minutes after meeting spy Trish Patterson. From Washington, D.C. to the hallowed halls of Oxford University and dusty African streets, a sinister power is stirring, one which will use Mangan and Patterson as pawns -- if they survive.
Deeply steeped in tension and paranoia, Adam Brookes's second novel is a remarkable, groundbreaking spy thriller.
Set in China, and ripped from today's headlines, comes a pulse-pounding debut that reinvents the spy thriller for the 21st century.
A lone man, Peanut, escapes a labor camp in the dead of night, fleeing across the winter desert of north-west China.
Two decades earlier, he was a spy for the British; now Peanut must disappear on Beijing's surveillance-blanketed streets. Desperate and ruthless, he reaches out to his one-time MI6 paymasters via crusading journalist Philip Mangan, offering military secrets in return for extraction.
But the secrets prove more valuable than Peanut or Mangan could ever have known... and not only to the British.
