These writers share a single preoccupation across settings ranging from wartime Berlin to the present day: what happens to an honest individual within a dishonest system. A detective who refuses to join the Party. A journalist who follows the wrong story into the wrong rooms. Spies are considered too inconvenient to trust. A tech entrepreneur forced to inhabit someone else's life. Official truth, in each of these worlds, is a fiction maintained at considerable cost. The real truth is what these writers are after.
Simon Scarrow, 'Blackout' - Berlin, 1939. A detective who refused the Party must solve a murder within a regime that distrusts him.
Peter May, 'The Man With No Face' - Brussels, 1979. Two bodies, one child witness, and a killer's portrait with the face deliberately left blank.
Mick Herron, 'Slow Horses' - Slough House is where failed spies go to rot and get one unwanted chance at redemption.
David Goodman, 'A Reluctant Spy'- A tech entrepreneur's intelligence cover identity becomes his only weapon when a rogue Russian general makes his move.
