Friends and Traitors

John Lawton’s Inspector Troy series is regularly singled out as a crime series of exceptional quality, spy thrillers that have earned comparisons to John le Carré, Philip Kerr, and Alan Furst and have been described as “vivid, moving, and wonderfully absorbing” by the Washington Post. The latest novel in the series—written to be read in any order—finds Inspector Troy entangled in Cold War tensions.

It is 1958. Chief Superintendent Frederick Troy of Scotland Yard, newly promoted after good service during Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to Britain, is not looking forward to a Continental trip with his older brother, Rod. Rod was too vain to celebrate being fifty so instead takes his entire family on “the Grand Tour” for his fifty-first birthday: Paris, Siena, Florence, Vienna, Amsterdam. Restaurants, galleries and concert halls. But Frederick Troy never gets to Amsterdam. After a concert in Vienna he is approached by an old friend whom he has not seen for years—Guy Burgess, a spy for the Soviets, who says something extraordinary: “I want to come home.” Troy dumps the problem on MI5 who send an agent to de-brief Burgess—but the man is gunned down only yards from the embassy, and after that, the whole plan unravels with alarming speed and Troy finds himself a suspect. As he fights to prove his innocence, Troy finds that Burgess is not the only ghost who returns to haunt him.

John Lawton has written seven previous Inspector Troy thrillers, two novels starring Joe Wilderness, one standalone novel, and a volume of history. His Inspector Troy novels have been named Best Books of the Year by the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and New York Times Book Review. He lives in England.