The astonishing true story of how the CIA, MI6 and a Soviet defector saved the world in 1962, as told in the new film, The Courier, starring Benedict Cumberbatch. In August 1960, a Soviet colonel called Oleg Penkovsky tried to make contact with the West. His first attempt was to approach two young American students in Moscow. He handed them a bulky envelope and pleaded with them to deliver it to the American embassy. MI6 and the CIA came to believe Penkovsky was genuine and so the two agencies decided to run the operation jointly. It ran right through the Berlin crisis - in an astonishing near-miss, Penkovsky learned that the Wall was going to be built four days before it happened but was unable to contact his handlers - and the Cuban Missile Crisis, in which rocket manuals Penkovsky had handed over were crucial in determining what President Khrushchev was doing, and helped President John F. Kennedy and his team end the crisis and avert a nuclear war. Penkovsky, codenamed HERO, is widely seen as the most important spy of the Cold War, and the CIA-MI6 joint operation to run him has never been bettered. But had the KGB already 'turned' Penkovsky and were the Russians making sure he saw the information they wanted him to see? If so, it may even have been possible that the whole Cuban Missile Crisis might have been a Russian deception operation. Thrilling, evocative and hugely controversial, Dead Drop blows apart some of the myths about one of the Cold War's most well-known operations as the world stood on the brink of nuclear destruction.

Joseph Hone's The Paris Trap, first published in 1977, saw him step aside from his sequence of 'Peter Marlow' novels to offer a different kind of political thriller. Jim Hackett and Harry Tyson first met in Paris, in days of hope - Hackett a promising actor, Tyson a budding writer. Twenty years later, their dreams soured, they are reunited in Paris for a substantive project: Hackett, now a movie actor, has been cast in a major film derived from a spy novel authored by Tyson, who now works for British intelligence. But the plot of the film, concerning a Palestinian terrorist cell, is about to be overtaken in the dramatic stakes by real events. 'A fine example of a vastly popular genre - the thinking man's thriller.' Irish Times 'Through a distorting filter of betrayals, private and public, Joseph Hone conducts us to a final scene so dire that Hamlet by comparison leaves the stage tidy.' Guardian

It's 1969, and MI6 agent Paul Dark has spent the last twenty-five years betraying his country. When a would-be Russian defector turns up with information about a high-level British double agent, Dark goes on the run--only to discover that everything he believes is a lie.
Bringing together three novels featuring double agent Paul Dark, "The Dark Chronicles" journeys from London to Nigeria and from Rome to Moscow in a heart-pounding saga of dubious loyalties, deadly conspiracies, and ruthless acts of revenge at the height of the Cold War.