Beyond the Funeral

"Beyond the Funeral" is a fast-moving spy thriller in which even the Russian secret service is fallible as they are outsmarted by the British and US agencies. A senior Russian diplomat goes on trial in the UK for conspiracy to poison a woman working for the Royal Navy in Portsmouth who had embarked on an on-line romance with a man who turned out to be a spy. He was "The Russian Lieutenant" in the author's previous book which ended with the funeral of the woman - and now there are the inevitable reprisals by Moscow, including another poisoning attack in Portsmouth. Along the way, readers will discover Samantha Lord, a new central character who gets her baptism of fire as a CIA operator with two risky assignments -in the first, she flees gunfire from a drug gang in Mexico and in the second she sets out to seek a group of Russian cyber-terrorists in Canada. Meanwhile, the Russian spy who posed as a naval officer for his on-line "affair" with the British woman is returned to Moscow in a dramatic spy-swap and is reprimanded by the GRU hierarchy ... but he then makes an unexpected reappearance at the end of the story.