The Unfortunate Englishman by John Lawton

The Unfortunate Englishman by John Lawton

Berlin, 1963. East End-Londoner turned spy Joe Wilderness has had better days. He is sitting in a West Berlin jail, arrested for shooting someone he thought was about to kill him. His old boss, Lieutenant Burne-Jones of MI6, comes to Berlin to free him, but only under the condition that he rejoin British Intelligence. The knowledge that Wilderness gained of Berlin's underworld while working the black market just after World War II will prove useful to Queen and country now that the city has become the epicenter of the Cold War, dividing the world in two with its wall.

On the other side of the Iron Curtain, another MI6 man, Geoffrey Masefield, is ruing the day he first agreed to be a spy. In the beginning, it had all seemed so simple, so glamorous: the international travel, the top secret files, the vodka, the women. . . . But now Masefield is stuck in Lubyanka, the KGB's Moscow prison, waiting for a lifeline from his former employer. Meanwhile, over in England, a Russian spy is pining for his homeland. Having lived as Bernard Forbes Campbell Alleyn for years and taken a wife and had two daughters under that alias, he's now been exposed as KGB Captain Leonid Liubimov. Arrested for treason and then for espionage, he is in prison at Wormwood Scrubs, London. The only ticket out for these two men is a spy exchange.

Posted back to Berlin, Wilderness is to oversee the exchange of Masefield and Liubimov, but his black market nous hasn't diminished. There's money to be made and ten thousand bottles of fine Bordeaux that Wilderness hasn't forgotten about. A brilliantly evocative novel from a writer regularly compared to John le Carr eacute;, The Unfortunate Englishman is a gripping tale of Cold War espionage, and the best laid plans of unfortunate men.

Second Violin, Flesh Wounds, and Bluffing Churchill are only a few of John Lawton's 10 works. His thriller Black Out earned a WH Smith Fresh Talent Award, his novel A Little White Death was called a New York Times notable book, and his most recent novel A Lily of the Field was rated one of the greatest thrillers of the year by The New York Times' Marilyn Stasio. He resides in the English county of Derbyshire.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780802126351
ISBN 10	0802126359
Title	The Unfortunate Englishman
Author	John Lawton
Series	Joe Wilderness Novels
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Black Cat
Year published	2017-03-14
Number of pages	480
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.