Philip Mangan

A lone man, Peanut, escapes a labour camp in the dead of night, fleeing across the winter desert of northwest China. Two decades earlier, he was a spy for the British; now Peanut must disappear on Beijing's surveillance-blanketed streets. Desperate and ruthless, he reaches out to his one-time MI6 paymasters via crusading journalist Philip Mangan, offering military secrets in return for extraction. But the secrets prove more valuable than Peanut or Mangan could ever have known... and not only to the British.

Fearing for his life, journalist Philip Mangan has gone into hiding from the Chinese agents who have identified him as British spy. His reputation and life are in tatters. But when he is caught in a terrorist attack in East Africa and a shadowy Chinese figure approaches him in the dead of night with information on the origins of the attack, Mangan is suddenly back in the eye of the storm.

The stunning third novel from multiaward-nominated author Adam Brookes is paranoid, tense and spy fiction at its very finest. In many ways, Pearl Tao was a typical American child. She spent summer days at the pool, played softball and lingered at suburban barbecues in her home city of Washington, DC. Yet she is also an academic prodigy, with a university place sponsored by a secretive advanced technology corporation. Only now, aged 19, has she begun to understand the terrifying truth of what her role is to be.