"Friends and Traitors"

New from Atlantic Monthly Press: Friends and Traitors by John Lawton.

About the book, from the publisher:

John Lawton’s Inspector Troy series is regularly singled out as of exceptional quality, earning comparisons to John le Carré, Philip Kerr, and Alan Furst. The latest novel in the spy thriller series—written to be read in any order—finds Inspector Troy entangled in Cold War tensions.It is 1958. Chief Superintendent Frederick Troy of Scotland Yard, newly promoted after good service during Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to Britain, is not looking forward to a Continental trip with his older brother, Rod. Rod was too vain to celebrate being fifty so instead takes his entire family on “the Grand Tour” for his fifty-first birthday: Paris, Siena, Florence, Vienna, Amsterdam. Restaurants, galleries, and concert halls. But Frederick Troy never gets to Amsterdam. After a concert in Vienna he is approached by an old friend whom he has not seen for years—Guy Burgess, a spy for the Soviets, who says something extraordinary: “I want to come home.” Troy dumps the problem on MI5 who send an agent to debrief Burgess—but the man is gunned down only yards from the embassy, and after that, the whole plan unravels with alarming speed, and Troy finds himself a suspect. As he fights to prove his innocence, Troy finds that Burgess is not the only ghost who returns to haunt him.

Combining richly atmospheric rendering of period and place, wonderfully well drawn characters—several of whom we have met before—with a compelling narrative full of twists and turns, Friends and Traitors will satisfy John Lawton’s many fans and win him new ones.

Learn more about the book and author at John Lawton's website.

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