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Nick Belsey series
Waking up on Hampstead Heath not far from a crashed squad car, Detective Nick Belsey wants out–out of London and out of the endless complications of his life. When Alexei Devereux, a wealthy hermit, vanishes, leaving behind a suicide note and his Porsche, Belsey discovers an opportunity–a new identity and a fortune–waiting for the taking.
Unfortunately, there are others who share the detective’s interest in Devereux, including Scotland Yard. A dead rich man with suspicious financial holdings is bound to have some dangerous ties and a few ruthless enemies. Now, Belsey and his clever plan are about to be overshadowed by far more ambitious players with their own brilliant–and deadly–scheme.
What secrets lie beneath the streets of London?
Monday 10 June, end of a hot day. The city had started drinking at lunchtime and by 3 or 4pm crime seemed the only appropriate response to the beauty of the afternoon…At quarter to five he felt his contribution to law and order had been made. He parked off the high street, sunk two shots of pure grain vodka into iced Nicaraguan espresso and put his seat back. In an hour he’d be off duty, and in a couple more he’d be on a date with an art student he’d recently arrested for drugs possession.
London is steaming under a summer of filthy heat and sudden storms – and Detective Nick Belsey, of Hampstead CID, is trying to stay out of trouble.
But then somebody sets him a riddle. How does a man walk into a dead-end alley and never come out?
And then reappear – to snatch a girl, to dump a body beneath a London skyscraper, to send Belsey a package of human hair.
The answer lies underground, where the secrets degenerating beneath the city’s sickly glitter are about to see the light of day.
Amber Knight is hot property – pop star, film star, front-page gossip.
DC Nick Belsey is less celebrated. He can’t shake his habit of getting into serious trouble and his career at Hampstead CID is coming to a dishonourable end. He is currently of no fixed address – squatting in a disused police station round the corner from Amber’s swanky Primrose Hill mansion.
But a knock on the door from a frantic and confused woman looking for her missing son is about to lead Belsey straight into the heart of Amber’s glittering life. When a body is found and a twisted crime spree ensues, Belsey finds himself dangerously embroiled in a world of celebrity, obsession, glamour and desperation
Nick Belsey’s on the run.
Touching down in Mexico City, he doesn’t have much in the way of funds, but he has a new continent and surely that’s enough to start afresh. But it’s not as easy as that. An idyllic interlude in a coastal village is interrupted when men turn up who seem to know exactly who he is. And they have some very urgent questions.
DI Kirsty Craik had also hoped she’d left Nick Belsey behind her, in the wilder days of her career. When a five am call instructs her to track him down or she’ll be dead by Christmas, it seems he’s walked back into her life with characteristic commotion. Craik is forced to break the rules once more to find out what her former lover is up to.
She needs to save herself, and, just maybe, to save Belsey too.
There is a dark side to MI6 that needs men like Elliot Kane – mercurial, inquisitive, free floating. He’s spent fifteen years managing events overseas that never make the papers, deniable and deeply effective. Kane is a ghost in his own life, picking up and dropping personalities as each new cover story comes into play. But when a woman he loves, Joanna Lake, vanishes without a trace in Kazakhstan, he is forced centre stage in his own life.
Drawn ever deeper into a realm of deception, Kane moves from merely infiltrating events to steering them. He’s used to a new mode of hybrid psychological warfare – but snowbound Kazakhstan presents unique challenges. Poised between China, Russia and the West, dictatorship and democracy, state intelligence and an increasingly powerful world of private agencies, it’s impossible to work out who is manipulating who. And Kane’s not the only one trying to figure out where Joanna Lake has gone or what she learned before disappearing.
Unable to trust anyone, hunted by his own colleagues, and with the life of someone he loves at stake, Kane needs to work out who is driving events, and why…
Ascension: the most remote island in the world . . .
Elliot Kane, former spy, trying to leave the world of espionage behind.
Kathryn Taylor: a stalled career in MI6, running the South Atlantic desk.
Rory Bannatyne: covert technical specialist. Dead, apparently of suicide.
Three friends from a mission many years ago reconnect when one of them dies on Ascension Island. Rory Bannatyne had been tasked with tapping a new transatlantic data cable, but a day before he was due to return home he is found hanged. When Kathryn Taylor begs Kane to go over and investigate, he can’t say no, but it’s an uneasy reintroduction to the intelligence game.
Ascension is a curious legacy of England’s imperial past. Only employees and their families are allowed to live there. It’s home to several highly-classified government projects, a British and American military base, and forty dead volcanic cones. Entirely isolated from the world, the disappearance of a young girl at the same time as Rory’s death means local tensions are high. Elliot needs to discover what happened to her as well as to Rory. But the island contains more secrets than even the government knows, and it’s not going to give them up without a fight.
How does a secret service confront its past, when its secrets must never be revealed?
Buried deep in MI6’s digital archives is the most classified directory of all. It doesn’t contain war plans or agent profiles, but shame: the misdeeds of politicians, royalty, business leaders and the service’s own personnel.
There are seven decades’ worth of images and recordings, usually acquired for the sake of assessing risk, sometimes as a guard against betrayal, often engineered by MI6 for their own purposes. They are the most sensitive two thousand terabytes of data in the Service’s possession. When material from the archive begins appearing online, panic spreads through the Establishment like wildfire.
At first, the security breach only manifests itself in apparently random events: a suicide, a disappearance, a breakdown. But when it’s discovered that the individuals concerned were all contacted by the same anonymous person, a connection comes into focus. The archive has been leaked. The hunt is now of unprecedented urgency before the entire political and business systems are fatally weakened. That’s when they call for Elliot Kane…
