John Lawton

"It’s London, the swinging sixties, and by all rights MI6 spy Joe Wilderness should be having as good a time as James Bond. But alas, his postings are more grim than glamorous. Luckily, Wilderness has a knack for doing well for himself even in the most unpromising postings, though this has gotten him into hot water in the past. A coffee-smuggling gig in divided Berlin was a steady money-maker but things went pear-shaped when he had to smuggle a...

"Charlotte is a British expatriate who has recently settled in the nation’s capital with her second husband, a man who looks intriguingly like Clark Gable, but her enviable dinner parties and soirées aren’t the only things she is planning. Meanwhile, Charlie Leigh-Hunt has been posted to Washington as a replacement for Guy Burgess, last seen disappearing around the corner and into the Soviet Union. Charlie is soon shocked to cross paths with...

With his Inspector Troy series, John Lawton has been compared to top historical espionage writers such as John le Carre and Len Deighton. Brilliantly re-creating London in the time of ration tickets and bread lines, Bluffing Mr. Churchill is a blistering page-turner. It is 1941. Wolfgang Stahl, an American spy operating undercover as an SS officer, has just fled Germany with Hitler's henchmen on his trail. Stahl's man in the American embassy, the...

John Wilfrid Holderness-aka Joe Wilderness-has gone from young Cockney cardsharp surviving the London Blitz to MI6 agent navigating war-ravaged Europe to his current career of "free-agent gumshoe" weathering Cold War fears and hard-luck times. Now he's being drawn back into the secret ops business when an ex-CIA agent asks him to spearhead one last venture: smuggle a vulnerable woman out of East Berlin. Arriving in Germany, it doesn't take long for...

The latest novel from the master spy novelist John Lawton follows Inspector Troy, now Scotland Yard's chief detective, deep into a scandal reminiscent of the infamous Profumo affair. England in 1963 is a country set to explode. The old guard, shocked by the habits of the war baby youth, sets out to fight back. The battle reaches uncomfortably close to Troy. While he is on medical leave, the Yard brings charges against an acquaintance of his, a hedonistic...

Spanning the tumultuous years 1934 to 1948, John Lawton's A Lily of the Field is a brilliant historical thriller from a master of the form. The book follows two characters—Méret Voytek, a talented young cellist living in Vienna at the novel's start, and Dr. Karel Szabo, a Hungarian physicist interned in a camp on the Isle of Man. In his seventh Inspector Troy novel, Lawton moves seamlessly from Vienna and Auschwitz to the deserts of New Mexico and...

New York PI Turner Raines is a has-been-and the things he has been include a broken Civil Rights worker, a second-rate lawyer, and a tenth-rate yippee reporter. But in 1969, as the USA is about to land a man on the moon and the Vietnam War is ripping the country to pieces, Raines is working as a skip tracer, making sure draft-dodgers are safe and sound in Canada. When Raines returns from Toronto, he discovers that his oldest friend, a left-wing journalist,...