Product Description

Ten years on from BLACK OUT, it is 1956 and the Cold War is at its height. For the first time, Soviet leaders (Bulganin and Khrushchev) visit Britain. The body of a diver is found floating near a russion ship at Portsmouth. Is this the excuse Bulganin and Khrushchev need to storm out and freeze the ColdWar still further? Cheif Inspector Troy, by parentage a Russian speaker, investigates ...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3557034 in Books
• Published on: 2003-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 512 pages

About the Author
John Lawton is a degenerating misanthrope who lives in a remote hilltop village in Derbyshire. He is not entirely sure why. He likes T.C. Boyle, Chuck Palahniuk and Cormac McCarthy - and considers the seminal text of our time to be Myron by Gore Vidal. He is keen on the cultivation of the onion and obscure varieties of potato. He hates tories, teachers and travel (in that order) - but loves to visit Arizona, Florence ... New York ...

Customer Reviews

A real find, a very original novel.
I couldn't put this down. Ordinarily the way this book was packaged - spies and thrills and all that guff - I would not have bothered to pick it up. But this writer brings so much more to the hackneyed old cold war plotlines. He bends and shapes recent history into an intriguing tale and rounds it out with flesh and blood, believable characters. Forget the thrills and spills it's the depth of characterisation that'll keep you reading. I'm now going out to buy all the others in the series.

Evocative history with a good crime to solve
Sgt Troy develops from Lawton's first novel, Blackout. There is a particularly well written scene where Troy sees Churchill walking down the corridors of the Houses of Parliament - some read this passage as though they were actually there. Lawton has a wonderful character in Troy: unusual and eccentric family; unorthodox life for a London copper and a broad range of colleagues and friends. Pigs don't fly but they must be fed; and the motorcycle maniac helps out.

Expect nothing usual from John Lawton and you will be enriched as well as entertained.

This book is cold war at an intense stage.

His best book - the "perfect" spy novel
When the cold war ended what would become ofthe cold war novel? Were the leCarres and Deightons going to out of a job? Well boys, this is the future. The cold war novel has retreated to the past... it's become the historical thriller. This book is loaded with detail, a beautifully drawn picture of the vanished world of the 1950s, rippling with tension, unexpected twists and turns. But the pay-off is in the characters. What woman reader could resist the divine Larissa Tosca? - what woman reader couldn't help but hate the womanizing, cheating lying hero, Chief Inspector Troy? I turned the pages waiting for his come-uppance. Does he get it? Well...that would be telling. Read it for yourself.