Showing results by author "Brian Freemantle" in All Categories

To prevent the escalating possibility of the Russian mob getting its hands on the main ingredient to build an atomic bomb, British agent Charlie Muffin is sent to Moscow, where he must go undercover as an arms trader to infiltrate leading Russian Mafia families.

There’s nothing surprising about the body. The wounds are precise, their meaning clear. The Washington, DC, cops have seen enough like them to know that they mean a mob hit. And when mobsters kill their own, there’s not much the police can do about it. They’re prepared to dismiss the case when someone looks at the dead man’s ID. He was Russian - and a diplomat. William Cowley, the head of the FBI’s Russian office, takes on the case.

On 5th December 1872, Captain David Reed Morehouse sighted the Mary Celeste, an American half-brig carrying 1,700 barrels of commercial alcohol, apparently calling for help. The fluttering he took to be a distress signal was a ripped, tattered sail; the wheel was unmanned; the master, Captain Briggs; his wife; their two-year-old daughter; and the entire crew had disappeared. Frederick Solly Flood, attorney general of Gibraltar, can see only one possible cause - mutiny and murder. In a tense courtroom, he is determined to prove a dreadful crime has been committed; turning a civil inquiry into a criminal prosecution.

Adrian Dodds is a man without hobbies, friends, or family, who works a very peculiar job. Though he looks like a pencil pusher, he is a British counter-intelligence agent. In his own quiet, bureaucratic way, Dodds is vital to the security of the United Kingdom. His latest assignment is debriefing Viktor Pavel, a Soviet aeronautics genius who escapes his handlers to become the Cold War’s most high-profile defector. Can he be trusted, or was he sent over as part of an elaborate Russian ruse?

Harvey Jordan is no ordinary thief. A few years ago, an identity-theft scheme left him destitute, his fortune stolen and his wife gone with it. After two years in the gutter, Harvey learned who ruined him and returned the favor, stealing back his money by taking over the crook’s identity. He didn’t recover his wife, but he did find a new career.

Death is no obstacle for Harold Taylor. Since the 18th century he has been reincarnated into a handful of identities. He won fame as an eye surgeon in Victorian England, established St. Louis’s first brothels as an American settler, and survived the trenches of the First World War only to be executed in a court martial. But despite his different lives, one thing always remains the same: Harold Taylor is a murderer. Blood is the secret to Taylor’s reincarnation. At each rebirth, he marks for death those who wronged him in the past, and by spilling their blood he guarantees himself another try at life. This time he has a new plan....

Walter Farr has done well for himself. One of the top investment counselors in New York, he has earned a fortune and amassed everything he could ever want, except a close relationship with his son, Howard. When the boy’s mother died, Walter did what he could for their child, but each year Howard pulled further and further away. Even so, Walter never expected something like this. Howard has been arrested for importing cocaine. The charge is not trivial - Howard’s crime could put him away for life - and to get him out of it Walter will do the unthinkable.

Harry Rudd has put his past behind him. He has forgotten his impoverished roots, his carefree college days, and his life with Angela. Forgetting Angela has been the hardest, but Rudd does what he can to keep his wife - who died giving birth to their first child - out of his mind. It is time to focus on business. With Angela’s death, Rudd inherited Best Rest, once a modest chain of Boston motels, now a global hospitality empire. For a company of such size, growth is crucial, and Rudd aims to expand quickly.

The KGB decides to use agent Otto Reimann to seduce Elke Meyer, the personal assistant to a top West German Cabinet member, to give over classified information, but Moscow does not count on the unpredictability of love.

The world financial market has become unbalanced. Nations in South America, Africa, and Eastern Europe are trillions of dollars in debt, and a default by any one of them could start a domino effect that would eventually topple the economies of America and Europe. Across the Western hemisphere, economists such as Tom Pike are devising a brilliant plan to head off the collapse. The situation is dire, but with transatlantic cooperation there should be time to stave off disaster. But something is not as it seems. Before long, Tom realizes that the economic turmoil was deliberately created.

With eviction looming, St. Ives searches for a big payday and a rare book. Philip St. Ives has no love for New York's drafty, broken-down Adelphi Hotel, but he is in no mood to be evicted from it. His cash dwindling, he is happy to learn about a job that calls for his specific talents as a mediator between thieves and their victims. It sounds like the set-up to a bad joke: A thief, an insurance salesman, and the Library of Congress call Philip's lawyer to ask about a stolen copy of Pliny's Historia Naturalis. To find it, Philip will risk becoming history himself.

Everyone knows Hawkins is not the reporter his father - a famous war correspondent - was. Hawkins’s fondness for drink disqualifies him from the kind of reporting that is his birthright. But with a father like his, the newspaper cannot let him go. Instead, the board has asked him to write a biography of his father - a fluff project designed to keep Hawkins out of trouble. But the assignment leads to unsuspected, shocking revelations.

In 1990—after the Iron Curtain has lifted but before East and West Germany become one—an uneasy truce exists between the spy agencies of Berlin’s two halves. As the governments of the divided state negotiate reunification, espionage continues quietly. That calm is about to explode. An English agent, on a routine collection of microfilm on the other side of Checkpoint Charlie, is arrested for spying, and all hell threatens to break loose.

Richard Parnell is one of the leading minds in gene therapy research, and he expects the job at Dubette, Inc., to be his first step to a Nobel Prize. But when he arrives at the American pharmaceutical giant, he finds himself shut out of the main avenues of research, isolated from the cutting edge in a way he has never been before.

The Soviet Union is in turmoil. With the election of Gorbachev have come new ideas about freedom, compassion, and openness - ideas that leave no place for the dark machinations of the KGB. Reform is coming to the Soviet intelligence service, unless Victor Ivanovich Kazin can stop it. Kazin is one of the Old Guard, and an agent doesn’t survive three decades in the KGB without being relentless. He is a liar, a cheat, a backstabber - and he is proud of it.

The treaty is so simple that the American president can hardly believe his luck. In exchange for a few million tons of grain, the Russians, gripped by famine, will withdraw all troops and missiles from Eastern Europe. What’s more, this great success comes in an election year! It’s too good to be true—and something is about to go wrong.

Josef Bultova nearly died in a Russian prison camp. Once one of the Soviet Union’s most adept international negotiators, his work with the West grew so intimate that the suspicious Politburo exiled him to Siberia. The meager food, heavy work, and bitter cold took its toll, sapping his strength until, just as he was sure he could no longer go on, the Politburo let him go.

Six Israeli commandos land on a lakeshore in Austria, hunting for something that has been hidden underwater for over thirty years. The lake holds many secrets left behind by the Nazi high command as their regime crumbled in 1945. There are millions of dollars in international currency, bonds, and gold bullion, but the commandos want none of it. They have come for boxes of files - containing information about the hiding places of every Nazi war criminal who evaded judgment at Nuremberg.

Richard Deaken has lost his nerve. Once a globally renowned trial lawyer, he has suffered a string of bad results that have sapped his confidence and dulled the edge necessary for success in the high-stakes world of international law. Resigned to life in obscurity, he has retreated to an unimpressive office in Geneva, where the trickle of low-paying clients doesn’t come close to supporting the lifestyle that he - and his wife - are used to. But a big case is right around the corner. Deaken’s new employers are soldiers in a vicious African civil war on the brink of erupting into unprecedented bloodshed.

The Great Merlini waits impatiently at the door of the Hotel Astor. Inspector Church is late for his meeting with the famed magician, with whom he consults when homicide cases venture outside the realm of the possible. A ventriloquist has attempted suicide in the wake of his wife’s mysterious strangulation. Among the suspects are a snake charmer, a nine-foot giant, a tattooed man, and a gaggle of crap players - and this is one of Merlini’s simple cases.