Free Country
by
Jeremy Duns
It is May 1969, and MI6 double agent Paul Dark stands alongside mourners at the funeral of Sir Colin Templeton; the former head of the organisation, the man he knew simply as 'Chief' - and the man he killed in cold blood. Dark has got away with it, evading the attentions of both his fellow British spies and the KGB operatives to whom he long ago pledged loyalty. But that precarious security is about to be shattered, launching Dark back into the heart of an international conspiracy and making him a target for both exposure and assassination.
Desperate to escape his predicament, Dark gambles everything on one last throw of the dice, exposing his Soviet handler to the British. But before long, he finds he has no choice but to go on the run again, taking him to the labyrinthine backstreets of Rome. The race is on to stop a deadly plot that dates back to the early years of the Cold War.
The second part of the Paul Dark trilogy, and sequel to the critically acclaimed FREE AGENT, SONG OF TREASON is another sweat-soaked Sixties-set spy thriller in the tradition of Len Deighton and Frederick Forsyth.
Desperate to escape his predicament, Dark gambles everything on one last throw of the dice, exposing his Soviet handler to the British. But before long, he finds he has no choice but to go on the run again, taking him to the labyrinthine backstreets of Rome. The race is on to stop a deadly plot that dates back to the early years of the Cold War.
The second part of the Paul Dark trilogy, and sequel to the critically acclaimed FREE AGENT, SONG OF TREASON is another sweat-soaked Sixties-set spy thriller in the tradition of Len Deighton and Frederick Forsyth.
Reviews
With its subtly deployed late-60s feel, Free Country is a treat for fans of traditional Len Deighton-style thrillers.
A cleverly twisted tale of intrigue and deception, this is a masterly excursion back to the bad old days of the Cold War.
‘Three-part homage to the morally ambiguous Sixties thrillers of Le Carré and Deighton... nuanced to the hilt.
The weight of Duns' historical detail is impressive... and the whole of the trilogy is much greater than the sum of its parts. The immediacy of Duns' writing grabs and suspends the reader in a beautifully realized heartbeat of recent history.