Close Call

MI5 Intelligence Officer Liz Carlyle is summoned to a meeting with her boss Charles Wetherby, head of the Service's Counter-Espionage Branch. His counterpart over at MI6 has received alarming intelligence from a high-placed Syrian source. The future of the whole of the Middle East is at stake and the deadline for action is drawing ever closer....

A man lies dying in a hospital in upstate Vermont. The nurses know only that he is an academic at a nearby university, but they have been instructed to call the FBI should anyone visit their patient. News of this suspected Russian illegal soon reaches MI5, where Liz Carlyle has been contacted by Mischa, a top secret source who is requesting a clandestine rendezvous in Berlin. 

MI5 Intelligence Officer Liz Carlyle learns from one of her agents that suspicious meetings have been taking place at an Islamic bookshop. She feels instinctively that a terrorist cell is at work and when she reports this to Charles Wetherby, the Director of Counter Terrorism, a surveillance operation is immediately put into place. An attack seems imminent.

Deep within a cave system at the Iranian military complex of Parchin, southeast of Tehran and hidden from the prying eyes of Western satellites, scientists are working round the clock on a banned device. Acting on the orders of a renegade cell within the ultraconservative Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, their intention is to propel Iran into the elite club of nuclear-armed nations - and seal its domination of the Middle East. 

For all fans of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy comes this master class in suspense about a spy caught up in his own web of deception.... Alec Milius is young, smart and ambitious - with a talent for deception. When a chance encounter opens the door to a career with MI6, he is desperate to make his mark. But life as a spy begins to take a terrible toll on himself and those around him, and soon Alec is chasing not just success but survival.

Introducing Luke Carlton - ex-Special Boat Service commando and now under contract to MI6 for some of its most dangerous missions. Sent into the steaming Colombian jungle to investigate the murder of a British intelligence officer, Luke finds himself caught up in the coils of a plot that has terrifying international dimensions.

DCI Nelson has been receiving threatening letters telling him to 'go to the stone circle and rescue the innocent who is buried there'. He is shaken, not only because children are very much on his mind, with Michelle's baby due to be born, but because although the letters are anonymous, they are somehow familiar. They read like the letters that first drew him into the case of The Crossing Places, and to Ruth. But the author of those letters is dead....

As a favour to her rock journalist boyfriend, private detective Kate Brannigan agrees to track down a missing songwriter, Moira Pollock - a search that takes her into some of the seediest parts of Leeds and Bradford. But little does she realise that finding Moira is only a prelude to murder. Juggling her other cases, including a search to uncover the source of counterfeit luxury goods, Brannigan finds herself for the first time on the trail of a killer.

When a troubled model falls to her death from a snow-covered Mayfair balcony, it is assumed that she has committed suicide. However, her brother has his doubts, and calls in private investigator Cormoran Strike to look into the case.Strike is a war veteran - wounded both physically and psychologically - and his life is in disarray. The case gives him a financial lifeline, but it comes at a personal cost: the more he delves into the young model's complex world, the darker things get - and the closer he gets to terrible danger...

Europe is still littered with the darkest secrets of the Cold War. And the most deadly revelation of them all is about to be made…Hard-up Russia expert Dr Sam Gaddis finally has a lead for a book that could set his career back on track. He has staggering new information about an unknown sixth member of the infamous Cambridge spy ring – a man who has evaded detection for his entire life

Brussels, 1979. Jaded Edinburgh journalist Neil Bannerman arrives in the capital of European politics intent on digging up dirt. Yet it is danger he discovers when two British men are found murdered. One victim is a journalist, the other a Cabinet Minister: the double assassination witnessed by the former's autistic daughter. This girl recalls every detail about her father's killer - except for one.

Successful novelist Kit Carradine has grown restless. So when British Intelligence invites him to enter the secret world of espionage, he willingly takes a leap into the unknown. But the glamour of being a spy is soon tainted by fear and betrayal, as Carradine finds himself in Morocco on the trail of Lara Bartok - a mysterious fugitive with links to international terrorism.

Jeff Hinkley, undercover investigator for the British Horseracing Authority, is looking into the shady activities of a racehorse trainer. But as he's tailing his quarry through the Cheltenham Racing Festival, the last thing he expects to witness is a gruesome murder. Could it have something to do with the reason the trainer was banned in the first place – the administration of illegal drugs to his horses? Days later, many more horses test positive for prohibited stimulants.

There's a serial killer targeting the streets of Newcastle, seemingly picking his victims at random but subjecting them all to the same torturous end. When the Chief Inspector on the case goes missing, it falls on DCI Ryan to track down the man who is brutally murdering women and goading the police to 'catch me if you can'. As everyone becomes a suspect, Ryan and his team get drawn further and further into the case, but for Ryan the nightmare gets closer to home than he could ever have imagined. 

Husband and wife Niamh and Ruairidh Macfarlane co-own Ranish Tweed: a Hebridean company that weaves its own special variety of Harris cloth, which has become a sought-after brand in the world of high fashion. But when Niamh learns of Ruairidh's affair with Russian designer Irina Vetrov, then witnesses the pair killed by a car bomb in Paris, her life is left in ruins. Along with her husband's remains, she returns home to the Isle of Lewis bereft.