Showing results by publisher "W. F. Howes Ltd" in Spies & Politics

At first glance, the murder of Peggy Frampton looks like a burglary gone wrong. But DS George Cross, with his meticulous methods, thinks otherwise. The victim, a former mayor of Bristol, is now an online influencer whose forthright opinions attract the kind of attention that most people would like to avoid. There's no shortage of suspects. Cross's investigation will lead him from Peggy's unfaithful husband to her gambling-addicted son, to a scorned former lover with a grudge. But she also has political enemies in her past.

As dawn breaks on a snowy February morning, a refrigerated lorry is found parked in the heart of London's Chinatown. Inside, 12 women, apparently illegal immigrants, are dead from hypothermia. But in the cab, DC Max Wolfe finds 13 passports. Twelve dead women. Twelve passports. The hunt for the missing woman will take Max Wolfe into the dark heart of the world of human smuggling, mass migration and 21st-century slave markets.

A soldier and a spy, an officer but not quite a gentleman, Captain Harry Walsh is SOE's secret weapon. Loathed by his own commanding officer, haunted by the death of his closest friend and trapped in a loveless marriage, Harry Walsh is close to burnout when he is ordered to assassinate the man behind the ME 163 Komet, Hitler's miracle jet fighter. If Walsh fails, there is no prospect of Allied victory in Europe. Harry Walsh is ruthless, unorthodox and ungentlemanly. He is about to wreak havoc....

February, 1944. A bitter winter grips occupied France, where Marc Reece leads a circuit of British agents risking their lives in order to sabotage the German war effort from within. But Reece has a second mission, secret even from his fellow agents - including Charlotte, the woman with whom he has ill-advisedly fallen in love. He must secure a document identifying a German spy at the heart of British intelligence. The fate of the Allied forces on D-Day is in his hands.

The life of secret agent James Bond has begun to fall into a pattern that threatens complacency…until the sunny afternoon when M is kidnapped. The action ricochets across the globe to a volcanic Greek island, where Colonel Sun Liang-tan of the People's Liberation Army of China collaborates with an ex-Nazi atrocity expert in a world-menacing conspiracy. Stripped of all professional aids, Bond faces, unarmed, the monstrous devices of Colonel Sun....

Dan Starkey is a young journalist in Belfast, who shares with his wife, Patricia, a prodigious appetite for drinking and dancing. Then Dan meets a beautiful and apparently impoverished student. And then, terrifyingly, she is murdered. Is it because she was not exactly who she claimed to be? Is it the IRA? A Protestant extremist group? A jealous lover? Before long, Dan is a target himself.…

The North Sea, October 1904 - When Russian warships bombard the Hull trawler fleet, killing innocent fishermen, public outrage pushes Britain and Russia to the brink of war, the sparks from which could inflame the entire continent. Doctor Ingo Finch, once of the Royal Army medical corps, is long done with military adventuring. But when a stranger seeks him out, citing a murderous conspiracy behind the infamous 'Dogger Bank Incident', Finch is drawn back into the dark world of espionage.

She is the perfect assassin. A Russian orphan, saved from the death penalty for the brutal revenge she took on her gangster father's killers. Ruthlessly trained. Given a new life. New names, new faces - whichever fits. Her paymasters call themselves The Twelve. But she knows nothing of them. Konstantin is the man who saved her and the one she answers to. She is Villanelle. Without conscience. Without guilt. Without weakness. Eve Polastri is the woman who hunts her. MI5, until one error of judgment costs her everything.

It started with the judge. He was about to sentence five of Cork's most notorious criminals. But his body has just turned up, beaten and broken, on an isolated road in his burned-out car. Now four members of a rival gang have been shot, and in retaliation three civilians have been blown up. To Katie's horror, Cork is becoming a gang battleground like Dublin. Can Katie save the city? Can she save herself?

There is a saying that when lovers fall out, a plane goes down. A Case of Exploding Mangoes is the story of one such plane. Why did a Hercules C130, the world's sturdiest aircraft, carrying Pakistan's military dictator General Zia ul Haq, go down on 17 August, 1988?

Was it because of: mechanical failure; human error; the CIA's impatience; a blind woman's curse; generals not happy with their pension plans; the mango season? Or could it be your narrator, Ali Shigri?

At first the rules were simple: quarantine the city and let the plague die. So men and women closed their doors and lived in lockdown, fighting for survival against a disease as contagious and destructive as the Black Death. A disease for which there was no known cure. But the plague did not die. And so, at lunchtime on a Friday afternoon, the president announces the new rules. Every American should take up arms to protect the disease-free zones. Anyone attempting to leave the plague-zone must be shot.

To solve this case, only an outsider will do...Ingo Finch faces his biggest challenge yet. New York, 1904 - over a thousand are dead after the sinking of the General Slocum, a pleasure steamer full of German immigrants out for a day on the East River. The community is devastated, broken, in uproar. With a populist senator preying on their grievances, a new political force is unleashed, pushing America to ally with Germany in any coming war. Nine months later, Ingo Finch arrives in Manhattan, now an official British agent.

Eli Amiram is Mossad’s star spy runner and the man responsible for bringing unparalleled intelligence to the Israeli agency. Now, he’s leading an audacious operation in the UK that feeds his ambition but threatens his conscience. The British and the Americans have intel Mossad desperately needs.To force MI6 and the CIA into sharing their priceless information, Eli and his maverick colleague Rafi undertake a risky mission to trick their allies: faking a terrorist plot on British soil.

Things are looking bad for disgraced spy August Drummond. In emotional free fall after the death of his wife, fired for a series of unprecedented security breaches that saw him labelled a traitor...and now his neighbour on the flight to Istanbul won’t stop talking. The only thing keeping him sane is the hunch that there’s something not quite right about the nervous young man several rows ahead - a hunch that is confirmed when August watches him throw away directions to an old European cemetery seconds before being detained by Turkish police.

When retired former spy Felicity Jardine's mission to drown herself is interrupted by a baby drifting down river, her training kicks in at once. She saves the baby, and conceals herself from the shady-looking man who is searching for it. Then an elderly neighbour to whom she bears a resemblance is found dead, and Felicity knows she's been rumbled. She has to dust off the highly trained and resourceful secret service officer she used to be, ensure the safety of the baby, and re-enter the fray.

Synchronized assassinations around the world have brought the global intelligence community to its knees. And it's just the beginning. Caught in the crossfire is MI6 covert operative Duncan Grant, who knows more about the mastermind behind the attack than anyone else. Grant must destroy an international network of disavowed operatives and assassins, led by a charismatic and ruthless arms dealer who has a plan to bring chaos and destruction to millions.

Villanelle is the ultimate assassin. Beautiful and heartless, she's been trained to be the best. Her latest target is a firebrand Russian leader whose extreme political theories threaten to unleash global conflict. But lying in wait for Villanelle is intelligence officer Eve Polastri. A hunter by nature, fiercely clever, Eve is ready to pursue her adversary wherever the search leads her. And so starts a deadly game between two brilliant and determined female protagonists…

Airliners are falling out of the sky. The United States is on lockdown. The President is about to punish the country behind the atrocities. But Adam Drake knows they're making a terrible error. A lawyer and former Special Forces Tier 1 operator, Drake has evidence that it’s a false flag operation to disguise the real party behind the attacks…terrorists operating from training camps in America with ties to a traitor in the White House.

In a remand centre in the Ural Mountains, Oxana Vorontsova awaits trial for triple murder. Not what you’d expect from a star linguistics student. Half a world away, her potential has been noted. Sprung from prison and trained in the dark arts of assassination, she’s reborn as the beautiful, lethal Villanelle. The price of her luxurious new life: to eliminate targets assigned to her by a shadowy group of all-powerful businessmen.

In the aftermath of Hamas's October 7th attack on Israel, Mossad's London station chief Eli Amiram is fighting battles on all fronts. When his ambitious rival plans an assassination on British soil—supposedly authorized by Trump supporters—Eli suspects a deeper conspiracy.