"It is 1913, and those who follow the news closely can see the world is teetering on the brink of war. Jack McColl, a Scottish car salesman with an uncanny ear for languages, has always hoped to make a job for himself as a spy. As his sales calls take him from city to great city--Hong Kong to Shanghai to San Francisco to New York--he moonlights collecting intelligence for His Majesty's Navy, but British espionage is in its infancy and Jack has nothing...

In the fourth and final installment of David Downing's spy series, Jack McColl is sent to Soviet Russia, where the civil war is coming to an end. The Bolsheviks have won but the country is in ruins.

"Paris, in April of 1968. The cafés are alive with talk of revolution, but for Scottish-American Will Flemyng-- a spy working in the British Embassy-- the crisis is personal. A few words from a stranger on the Metro change his life. His family is threatened with ruin and he now faces the spy's oldest fear: exposure. Freddy Craven is the hero and mentor Flemyng would trust with his life, but when he is tempted into a dark, Cold War labyrinth, he chooses...

"London 1909: The British Empire spans the globe, seen as an invulnerable imperial power. But Captain Vernon Kell, head of counter-intelligence at the War Office, knows better. In Russia, there is revolution in the wind; in Germany, an arms race; and in London, the streets are alive with foreign agents provocateur. Kell wants to set up a Secret Service, an agency with a mandate to act domestically and abroad to protect the Empire, but to convince...

A perfectly told tale of defeat and glory--and a paean to gallantry in the face of the absurd--inspired by a real-life secret mission during World War II. Orphaned in the first months of World War One, when his father is killed in action, Willie Maryington dreams only of joining the same cavalry regiment and going to the front. The Armistice dashes seventeen-year-old Willie's plans, but not his dreams of glory, and he makes the regiment the center...