Avenger

The cocaine industry is worth billions of dollars a year to the drug cartels who spread their evil across Western society, causing incalculable misery, poverty and death. Slowly, gradually, inexorably it is spreading and it is a blight which must be stopped. One man, Paul Devereaux, intellectual, dedicated, utterly ruthless and ex-CIA special ops, is given what seems like an impossible task. At his disposal is anything he wants – men, resources, money. And he will not stop until he has completed his mission.

When British and US intelligence catch wind of a major Al Qaeda operation, they're ready for action. But what can they do? They know nothing about the attack, so they plant The Afghan, a prisoner of Guantanamo Bay and a former commander of the Taliban.

It is 1999 and Russia is on the edge of total implosion. Social and moral order has collapsed and what small semblance of control there is, is being imposed by mafia-like criminal gangs. While public opinion in the West is largely indifferent, the political analysts are less sanguine - Russian meltdown will make the disintegration of the Balkans look like the collapse of a cup-cake.

Plan Aurora, hatched in a remote dacha in the forest outside Moscow and initiated with relentless brilliance and skill, is a plan within a plan that, in its spine-chilling ingenuity, breaches the ultra-secret Fourth Protocol and turns the fears that shaped it into a living nightmare. A crack Soviet agent, placed under cover in a quiet English country town, begins to assemble a jigsaw of devastation.

The kidnapping of a young man on a country road in Oxfordshire is but the first brutal step in a ruthless plan to force the President of the United States out of office. If it succeeds, he will be psychologically and emotionally destroyed. Only one man can stop it - Quinn, the world's foremost Negotiator, who must bargain for the life of an innocent man, unaware that ransom was never the kidnapper's real objective...

The Kill List: a top-secret catalogue of names held at the highest level of the US government. On it, those men and women who would threaten the world's security. And at the top of it, The Preacher, a radical Islamic cleric whose sermons inspire his followers to kill high-profile Western targets in the name of God. As the bodies begin to pile up in America, Great Britain and across Europe, the message goes out: discover this man's identity, locate him and take him out.

Deception, blackmail, murder, revenge - these are themes of stories that move from London to the coast of Spain, from Mauritius to Dublin. Whether his subject is assassination by stealth, gun-smuggling or the cruel confidence trick Forsyth is never less than compulsive.Here are eight stories with the Forsyth touch - a brilliant and original collection by an incomparable craftsman of suspense.

During those fateful weeks before Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, a fragment of radio intercept had referred to Qubth-ut-Allah, a devastating secret weapon that could rain death and destruction on the Allied forces. Despite Allied scepticism, Major Mike Martin, an SAS man who can pass as an Arab, is sent into Kuwait to assess Iraqi strength and help the resistance.

Sam McCready is The Deceiver, one of the Secret Intelligence Service's most unorthodox and most valued operatives, a legend in his own time. The end of the cold war has, however, strengthened the hand of the Whitehall mandarins, to whom he seems about as controllable as Genghis Khan, so Sam is to have his fate decided at a special hearing.

An astonishing discovery is made in the remote African republic of Zangaro, one which could change the course of a nation's history forever. But such a discovery cannot be kept secret for long and Sir James Manson will stop at nothing to protect this find. A ruthless and bloody-minded tycoon, Manson immediately hires an army of mercenaries and with this deadly crew behind him he sets out to topple the government and replace its dictator with a puppet president.

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?

Random House presents the audiobook edition of The Fox by Frederick Forsyth. The 18th novel from best-selling thriller writer Frederick Forsyth, the man who defined the genre. The Fox is based on the stories of British hackers Gary McKinnon and Lauri Love and centres around an 18-year-old schoolboy with Asperger’s Syndrome who is able to penetrate intricate firewalls to access the secrets at the highest level of foreign governments and other major organisations.

CIA analyst Jack Ryan, historian and former Marine, is vacationing in London with his wife and young daughter. Suddenly, right before his eyes, a terrorist group launches its deadly attack. Instinctively, Jack dives forward to intervene. By his impulsive act, he gains both the gratitude of a nation and the enmity of its most dangerous men who will not sit on their hate. In an explosive wave of violence, Jack's new enemies will seek to make him pay for his act of salvation...with his life.

One of the most celebrated thrillers ever written, The Day of the Jackal is the electrifying story of an anonymous Englishman who in, the spring of 1963, was hired by Colonel Marc Rodin, Operations Chief of the O. A. S., to assassinate General de Gaulle.

When Moslem fundamentalists blow up a key Soviet oil complex, making an already critical oil shortage calamitous, the Russians figure they are going to have to take things into their own hands. They plan to seize the Persian Gulf, and more ambitiously, to neutralise NATO. Thus begins Red Storm, an audacious gamble that uses diplomatic maneuvers to cloak a crash military build-up. When Soviet tanks begin to roll, the West is caught off guard. What looks like a thrust turns into an all-out shooting war, possibly the climactic battle for control of the globe.