Paris, 1943. The swastika flies from the top of the Eiffel Tower. Soldiers clad in field grey patrol the streets. Buildings have been renamed, books banned, art stolen and people disappeared. Amongst the missing is an Allied intelligence cell. Gone to ground? Betrayed? Dead? Britain's Special Operations Executive need to find out. They recruit ex-Parisian and Bletchley Park codebreaker Harry Mitchell to return to the city he fled two years ago. 

This is the incredible tale of Operation Fifth Column, a Second World War MI5 operation so secret that its existence was revealed by the National Archives for the first time only in 2014. Throughout the war and even for a couple of years afterwards, 'Agent Jack' - in reality, a bank clerk named Eric Roberts - acted as a Gestapo agent to whom hundreds of British-based Nazi sympathisers and informers passed their secrets, thinking that he was sending them back to Germany.

In the dying days of the Second World War, a group of Nazis frantically plot the next steps for their country. SS recruits gather east of Berlin to be trained for an audacious yet ill-fated mission to bring about a Fourth Reich. Three decades later, a young British diplomat in East Berlin is compromised after falling into a honey-trap. He contacts Major Edgar, a veteran British spymaster, now retired. Edgar is drawn into an unlikely alliance with an old adversary, Viktor, the veteran Russian spymaster.  

This big-canvas international spy thriller marks the beginning of a brilliant new direction for Rory Clements. 1936. Europe is in turmoil. The Nazis have marched into the Rhineland. In Russia, Stalin has unleashed his Great Terror. Spain has erupted in civil war. In Berlin, a young Englishwoman evades the Gestapo to deliver vital papers to a Jewish scientist. Within weeks she is found dead, a silver syringe clutched in her fingers.

London, 1941. The city is in blackout, besieged by nightly air raids from Germany. Two strangers are about to meet. Between them they may alter the course of the war. While the Blitz has united the nation, there is an enemy hiding in plain sight. A group of British citizens is gathering secret information to aid Hitler’s war machine. Jack Hoste has become entangled in this treachery, but he also has a particular mission: to locate the most dangerous Nazi agent in the country.

It's not unusual for spies to have secrets, but Henry Hunter has more than most, and after he is stopped by British Intelligence at Croydon airport on the eve of the Second World War, he finds he has even more. In March 1941 in Berlin, haunted by a dark episode from his past, he makes a fateful decision resulting in a dramatic journey to the Swiss frontier, with a shocking outcome.

In 1986, news that East-West nuclear-arms negotiations are taking place lead many to believe the Cold War may finally be thawing. For British intelligence officer Major Tom Fox, however, it is business as usual. Ordered to arrange the smooth repatriation of a defector, Fox is smuggled into East Berlin. But it soon becomes clear that there is more to this than an old man wishing to return home to die - a fact cruelly confirmed when Fox's mission is fatally compromised. 

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.

London, 1963. The Beatles, Carnaby Street, mini skirts. But the new mood hasn't reached the drab and fearful corridors of MI5 and MI6. Many agents joined the secret service to fight the Nazis. Now they are locked in a Cold War against the Russians. And some of them are traitors. The service has been shaken to its core by the high-profile defections of Cambridge-educated spies Burgess, MacLean and now Philby. Appalled at such flagrant breaches of British security, the Americans are demanding a rigorous review.

Berlin, 1938: Newly appointed military attaché Noel Macrae and his extrovert wife, Primrose, arrive at the British embassy. Prime Minister Chamberlain is intent on placating Nazi Germany, but Macrae is less so. Gathering vital intelligence, Macrae is drawn to Kitty Schmidt's Salon - a Nazi bordello - and its enigmatic Jewish hostess, Sara Sternschein, who is a treasure trove of knowledge about the Nazi hierarchy in a city of lies, spies and secrets. Does she hold the key to thwarting Hitler?

Ex-policeman Bernie Gunther thought he'd seen everything on the streets of 1930s Berlin - until he turned freelance and he is sucked further into the grisly excesses of Nazi subculture. The year is 1936 and Berlin is preparing for the Olympic Games. Some of Bernie's Jewish friends are beginning to realise that they should have left while they could, and Bernie himself has been hired by a wealthy industrialist to investigate two murders that reach high into the Nazi Party.

As governor of Galicia, SS Brigadesführer Otto Freiherr von Wächter presided over an authority on whose territory hundreds of thousands of Jews and Poles were killed. By the time the war ended in May 1945, he was indicted for 'mass murder'. He spent three years hiding in the Alps before making his way to Rome and being taken in by the Vatican where he remained for three months. While preparing to travel to Argentina on the 'ratline' he died unexpectedly, in July 1949, a few days after having lunch with an 'old comrade' whom he suspected of having been recruited by the Americans. 

France, July 1944: In the Pas de Calais, Nathalie Mercier, a young British special operations executive secret agent working with the French Resistance, disappears. In London her husband, Owen Quinn, an officer with Royal Navy Intelligence, sets off on a perilous hunt through France in search of his wife. With the help of the Resistance, he finds Nathalie, but then the bitterness of war and its insatiable appetite for revenge catch up with them in a dramatic fashion.

It is June 1941 and Denmark is under German occupation. On the rocky coast of Denmark, two brothers, Harald and Arne Olufsen, starkly different in nature, are straining against the rigid confines imposed by their austere, elderly parents and trying to find their own way in life. Meanwhile, a network of MI6 spies is attempting to decipher an encrypted Luftwaffe radio signal which mentions the new Freya-Gerät - a rudimentary form of German radar equipment.

In April 1942, Hitler and Mussolini plan the huge offensive on the Eastern Front that will culminate in the greatest battle in human history. Hundreds of miles away, Pyotr Vavilov receives his call-up papers and spends a final night with his wife and children in the hut that is his home. As war approaches, the Shaposhnikov family gathers for a meal: despite her age, Alexandra will soon become a refugee, Tolya will enlist in the reserves, Vera, a Nurse, will fall in love with a wounded pilot and Viktor Shtrum will receive a letter from his doomed mother which will haunt him forever.