Joe Wilderness

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 Wilderness to discover he's become an unwitting pawn in a deadly game of atomic proportions. To survive it, Wilderness must follow a serpentine trail through his past, into the confidence of an unexpected lover, and go dangerously deep into a black market scam the likes of which Berlin has never seen. The author of the acclaimed Inspector Troy series.

It's the summer of 1961, and the inscrutable Khrushchev is developing plans for something that could change the fate of the Cold War. As he and Kennedy gamble with the fate of millions of lives, Cockney East-Ender-turned-spy Joe Wilderness is thrust into the conflict. Enlisted by MI6 to set up office in Berlin, Wilderness returns to the city where he spent his postwar years, where a former paramour is under threat, and where the dividing line between the West and the Soviets will soon be crossed. As the Russians start building the wall, two agents find themselves trapped on opposing sides: an unfortunate Englishman in the Lubyanka in Moscow, and a KGB operative in London's Wormwood Scrubs. Now, Wilderness has a new mission: Swap the prisoners on Berlin's bridge of spies. But, as a former black marketer, Wilderness is also working a personal angle-just to make it interesting, just to make it profitable, just to make it a little more dangerous. What can possibly go wrong?

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. In the wake of an embarrassing disaster for MI6 in a divided Berlin, Wilderness is reprimanded with a posting to remote northern Finland under the guise of a cultural exchange program to promote Britain abroad. Bored by his work, with nothing to spy on, Wilderness strikes a deal with his old KGB pal Kostya to smuggle vodka into the USSR. But there is something fishy about why Kostya has suddenly turned up in Finland-and MI6 intelligence from London points to a connection with cobalt mining in the region, a critical component in the casing of the atomic bomb. Wilderness's posting is getting more interesting by the minute, but more dangerous too. Moving from the no-man's-land of Cold War Finland to the wild days of the Prague Spring, and populated by old friends-including Inspector Troy-and old enemies alike, Hammer to Fall is a gripping tale of deception and skullduggery, of art and politics-a page-turning story of the always-riveting life of the British spy.