From Publishers Weekly
Egleton's latest thriller (after 2004's
Assassination Day) opens with a bloody massacre in a quiet Italian restaurant in a fashionable London neighborhood and takes off from there at full speed. The victims include a mid-rank British intelligence agent, a shady Egyptian businessman and a mysterious woman found dead in the men's room. SIS, where the dead agent was employed, at first thinks it was a drug deal gone bad, but the agency's often troublesome chief troubleshooter, Peter Ashton, soon links the murders to a leading terrorist, Talal Asir, coyly described as being "distantly related to the Saudi ruling family" and last seen in consultation with a top Syrian official in Damascus. Bombs begin to go off at British consulates, and only Ashton has all the necessary skills, insights and guts to unravel an international terrorist plot. Egleton, who shares Ashton's deep knowledge of the world of intelligence, must have great fun sitting in his home on the Isle of Wight and creating such a violent and dangerous world.
(Mar.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Product Description
When an British secret service operative turns up dead in a London restaurant shoot-out, the SIS suspects that he was caught in the crossfire of a robbery with overtones of underworld drug gangs, and that his death was coincidental. But it soon turns out that one of the corpses was a shadowy figure with multiple identities and potential ties to terror organizations. Evidence of a cover-up emerges from somewhere deep within the British secret services, and it becomes clear to Peter Ashton and the SIS that something far more nefarious than a random shooting has taken place. Even more alarmingly, when suicide bombers attack British Council offices in Pakistan and Russia, it becomes obvious that a terrorist operation is underway. Now it's up to Ashton and his colleagues to follow the faint traces, uncover and disrupt the operation, and track down the two central figures at the heart of the conspiracy.
