Terence Strong

Page Updated: 08/09/2004

Terence Strong

Cold Monday

pbk 10 Aug 04

Rogue Element

White Viper

Bombing out in the Andes

A Walk on the Dark Side of Ulster DON'T MISS the story behind Terence Strong's powerful new thriller - ROGUE ELEMENT -

by Terence Strong

About the Author

Bibliography

Paperback - Pocket Books (2004)

First British Edition Simon & Schuster (2004)

Cold Monday
One man’s tortured past could hold the key to Europe’s future...
For five fruitless years ex-SAS operative Ed Coltrane has been hunting down the brutal killers of his wife, a UN translator working in Bosnia. But drink and dead ends have got the better of him.
Now an old colleague tells him that one of the killers is alive and well in London, a guest of Her Majesty’s Government. Coltrane has one more chance. He can’t make a mess of this one.
What he doesn’t know is that his desire for vengeance will lead him into deadly conflict - bringing him face to face with an act of national betrayal as shocking as it is unexpected.
All that’s required is to silence one man.
But that man is Ed Coltrane. And he’s in no mood to compromise …
Praise for Terence Strong’s novels
`Tension ratchets up wickedly - a strong sense of reality is reinforced with powerful emotion and gritty characters’ Daily Telegraph
‘Yet again an edge-of-the-chair thriller with the chilling grip of authenticity’ Sunday Independent
`Extremely good’ Jack Higgins
`An expert miasma of treachery and suspicion building to a thrilling climax’ Observer
`Mr Strong’s story races along, action-crammed with violence and sex’ Sunday Express
‘Well-plotted and genuinely exciting’ Sunday Telegraph
`A man who knows his tradecraft, spy talk, survival skills, muzzle velocities and conspiracy theory as well as anyone in the business’ Guardian

First British Edition Heinemann (1997)

Rogue Element
Who set-up, funded and trained the Provisional IRA? Who responded by controlling and directing Loyalist terror gangs to counter the Provisional IRA? Who formed a top secret Loyalist civilian 'Resistance Movement' to cope with all out Civil war or British withdrawal from the province? And who smuggled in thousands of arms, explosives and communications equipment? Why is that movement now out of control and poised to take the counter terrorist war to southern Ireland? Will you read about it, before it starts..? If you don't know the answers you would never even dream of the questions
No stranger to researching his thrillers in danger zones, bestselling author Terence Strong followed up earlier Loyalist contacts in Northern Ireland from The Tick Tock Man (about bomb disposal in Ulster and London) to investigate and unearth a Pandora's Box of information about Ulster's secret war never before told.
These stunning revelations are woven into the fabric of his unusual and effective thriller which combines a legal drama with the fast action for which he is renowned.
It is a neat trick, but it wasn't easy to pull off, as the author freely admits.

'The action thriller is a very immediate beast, but legal procedures are mind-numbingly slow,' he says. 'TV and film can bridge that gap by cutting, so you're unaware that it takes at least nine months or a year for a murder charge to come to trial. It took some doing and a lot of rewrites to get there.' (Terence Strong)

His own solicitor and barrister legal team - Bill Webb and Christopher Sutton Mattocks - helped enormously, with additional input coming from Michael Mansfield QC and exonerated 'arms-to-Iraq' businessman Gerald James, who knows what it's like to have to fight the might and vindictiveness of the British establishment.
Rogue Element tells the story of a quiet Ulsterman who, for twenty years, worked under cover for M15, helping to contain Loyalist terror gangs. Then M15 asks one favour too many, an act of personal betrayal.
When he refuses, he sees his world collapse. During the blossoming hope of peace when the IRA announces its ceasefire, he is accused of murdering a key Republican negotiator. And the evidence against him is overwhelming.
Only one man believes his innocence. His brother-in-law Chris Lomax, whose life the Ulsterman once saved when they swerved together in the Falklands.
An expert tracker and just retired from the SAS as a burnt-out case, Lomax finds himself on the trail of the most dangerous adversary of all. A rogue element within the secret state.
Aided by the crusading zeal of defence lawyer Sam Browne, as renowned for her fiery temperament as her goods looks, Lomax has to take on the police, government and the legal system in a harrowing attempt to prove his friend's innocence.
Yet, as justice runs its course, they are destined to investigate and discover dark secrets about Ulster's past and MI5's inextricable involvement in it.
That includes a terrifying and long-forecast prophecy that is already moving inexorably towards horrific fulfilment as a nation is betrayed.
DON'T MISS the story behind Terence Strong's powerful new thriller - Rogue Element - A Walk on the Dark Side of Ulster

White Viper
Terence Strong's tenth thriller has its origins in a research trip he made to the Greek island of Crete a couple of years ago.
He arrived off-season in April and found that the tour company had given him an apartment next door to another lone traveller. The two men had a drink together and immediately got on well.
Strong had met the ‘real life’ character on whom he was to base Kurt Mallory, a most extraordinary man with a most extraordinary story to tell. Nuances and passing comments made by Kurt were picked up by Strong which would be missed by the casual listener. Gradually, as trust was established between them, the truth gradually surfaced.
Only later the author learned that Kurt's holiday in Crete was to rest and recuperate after a harrowing undercover mission to Colombia. There, as part of a join UK/US/Israeli hit team, he had single-handedly infiltrated a vicious British-manned cocaine production and distribution network linked to the former Medellin cartel.
He worked with the gang for several long weeks, having to witness intimidation and atrocities directed at the local population which he was helpless to stop, before his intelligence-gathering mission was complete.
Finally the hit team struck, wreaking a most terrible retribution and extracting details of a narcotics network that snaked all the way back to the British Isles. In the end, over thirty British nationals disappeared in the remote Andean cuchillos. No trace of the bodies has ever been found.
As Kurt himself told Strong somewhat graphically: ‘You survive in this game like the jaguar, by burying your shit behind you.’
The essential facts of White Viper are true. Most incredible of these is the existence of the organisation that has no name. An organisation dedicated to tracking down and destroying - by whatever means - those responsible for spreading the misery of narcotics addiction around the world. Reaching out to the untouchables who believe they are beyond the law.
And perhaps they are. But they are not beyond the cold hand of the organisation to which the real-life Kurt Mallory has devoted his life.
Little has been changed in this fictionalised account of Kurt's own astounding origins, his life or personality. It is how you find it.
Never again will you look in the same way at that scruffy tramp, that vagrant, that vago pequeno as they say in South America.
Because, one day, he may be your only salvation.

Exclusive - The story behind White Viper in the words of the author
BOMBING OUT IN THE ANDES `I’ve heard there's a bomb at the air strip,' Hermando told us.
Already I had discovered that Hermando was very well-informed when it came to the activities of the local left-wing ELN guerrillas who controlled the surrounding countryside outside the remote Colombian town of Malaga in the Andean foothills. The reason was simple. Bearded, bespectacled and gently-mannered, he taught English at the local college and many of the guerrillas were his former pupils. And through `a friend of a friend' he had already arranged safe-passage for me to the even more remote settlement of Concepion. That was twenty kilometres farther into the unforgiving cuchillos where the real events which inspired White Viper had taken place.
The truth was that, despite my deliberately unkempt appearance, my fair hair and blue eyes rather set me apart from your average Latino. And, to a penniless peasant guerrillero all gringos were considered fair game for kidnap and ransom and I really didn't fancy my wife having to remortgage the house in order to get me back. Added to which I wasn't yet sure how highly my new publishers Heinemann valued me. How many pesos would their notoriously `hard-nosed' Aussie MD John Potter reckon a seasoned thriller writer like me was worth? Not as much as the guerrillas, I suspected.
I had already forged a letter of accreditation from the University of Southampton, passing myself off as a professor studying Indian cultures in the Andes, but this was for the benefit of bent-cops after back-handers. I doubted it would work on illiterate guerrillas, (Of course, the forgery should have been unnecessary. Just before I'd left England I'd lectured on the art of thriller-writing to their Writer's Conference and thought they'd happily provide the documentation. They refused on the grounds that my showing it to some gun-happy comisario in the upper reaches of the Orinoco might bring the university into disrepute!)
Anyway, Hermando's promise that I could pass through guerrilla territory unmolested held good and now here he was again offering words of sound advice. Having endured the nine hour death-defying bus journey to Malaga from Bogota, along tortuous mountain mud tracks, passing through the cloud base in hour after hour of torrential rain, I'd decided to return by taking the little two-engined airliner off the shelf like strip above the river canyon. My interpreter Luz - who charmingly combined flirtatious wit with a feisty determination to get me to wherever I wanted to go - and I were packing to catch the flight when Hermando arrived to say his goodbyes and at the same time warn us that we weren't going anywhere.
`We often get bomb threats,' he explained. `They never come to anything, but it's enough for the airline to cancel any flights. It's in their insurance contract. Of course it's just a rumour...'
The words had hardly escaped his lips when the hotel shook. Of course it could have been an earth tremor, But I'd only just finished writing The Tick Tock Man about terrorist bomb disposal and, by golly, I knew a bomb when I heard one! I ran to the hotel roof and sure enough a pall of smoke was drifting skyward from the strip barely half a mile away.
We were now faced with the daunting prospect of a return journey by bus. It was awful enough for us to open the plastic bottle of whisky in search of solace. Then suddenly the phone rang. Luz had obviously made an impression on someone at the airline office at the strip. The flight had indeed been cancelled, but a little Police Cessna was taking off in five minutes. If we could make it, there were two seats for us.
Grabbing rucksack and bag, Luz and I bade farewell to Hermando, checked out and ran like crazy for the strip. We arrived just in time, the little eggshell-fragile single-engined aircraft already warming up. Squeezing into the back we joined the pilot and other three passengers. It was so cramped we couldn't move and we were poked in the face as a bag was passed back to lighten the front weighting. The tiny machine began to move, bouncing along the strip towards the yawning abyss of the river canyon.
`Is the hatch shut properly?' the pilot called back and Luz translated, her eyes white and wide. I checked. It wasn't. Too late now. I just grabbed the handle and held the hatch shut as though my life depended on it - which I suppose it did, really.
I then realised that the souvenir machete, strapped to the side of the rucksack on my lap, was pointed straight at my groin. Never mind a crash, just an emergency stop and I was done for now. Then we were airborne, swooping out over the aching emptiness of the cuchillos, one of the most desolate and inhospitable landscapes on earth.
I think it was then that I realised I had done the two very thing I'd promised myself I never would; fly in a single-engine aircraft in the Andes and never in the afternoon when the mountain thermals were at their most unpredictable. Nevertheless it seemed an appropriately dramatic end to my visit to the location of the true White Viper story. I would use that memorable and heart-stopping flight and the only slightly less hair-raising outward bus journey to good effect when I later came to write my fictional account.
Only I wasn't finished yet. I'd already swum, unwittingly, with the piranhas in the Orinoco in the badlands of Venezuela, but unknown to me then, I had yet to be stranded in the notorious Chapare coca growing region of the Amazon at midnight and to be mistaken for a member of the DEA by the local narcos.
Above original work copyright TERENCE STRONG 1997.

About The Author
Terence Strong spend his childhood in post-war south London, playing in the blitzed bomb-sites or running the gauntlet of the brown-uniformed keepers in Battersea Park. These were the stark and evocative settings for his wild and vivid imagination before the days of early black and white television.
(In his thriller WHITE VIPER, he has given his heroine George Savage a flat at his old home in No 3 Banbury Street)
Despite encouragement from his parents, he was slow to start reading. The first book he bought for himself was The Adventures of Robin Hood, based on the Walt Disney movie starring Richard Todd.

`I thought I went by myself to buy it.' he recounts. `It was an awfully big adventure. I didn't know that my dear old mum was following at a discreet distance - just in case I was abducted or something. I've no doubts where I've got my imagination from. God knows what the neighbours made of her stalking me down the street!'

He discovered the childish joys of Alison Uttley's Sam Pig at the ridiculously late age of nine, but advanced quickly on to Mark Twain. The adventures of Tom and Huck struck a chord with young Terry Strong and his own less prosaic exploits in the bomb-flattened metropolis. And barely had he begun to be enthralled by the Old Wild West in R.M. Ballantyne's A Dog Called Crusoe and Gene Autry, than he stumbled upon the Biggles books of Captain W.E. Johns.

`I went all over the world with those characters,' he recalls. `I read over forty of the books and they opened my eyes to travel, geography, people and different cultures. In fact today I like to quip that I write Biggles books for grown-ups, but I'm only half joking. I love to take my readers to a different part of the world with each book when I can and show them things they'd probably never even see as ordinary tourists.'

Looking back he sees this time as providing the foundations for his career as a thriller writer. He discovered Buchan, Bulldog Drummond, Blackshirt, Raffles and progressed on to Ambler, Hemingway and the newly-published Ian Fleming. By the time he was fourteen he had failed his 11-plus but then won the top award for English in his year amongst all twenty-six branches of the Clarke's College private grammar schools. Already his heart was set on being a foreign correspondent and thriller writer. At sixteen he completed his first full-length novel, entitled Sweet Smell of Intrigue.
Having decided it was not up to scratch, he buried it away and concentrated on finding his first job. At the time further studies and the thoughts of university had no appeal; he was anxious to make his mark on the big wide world. For some reason at that time he had abandoned serious thoughts about journalism (`It may have been the thoughts of reporting tedious council meetings for the local rag,' he now admits. `For me it was front-line war correspondent or nothing!') and set his sights on something more practical: advertising copywriting.

`My career adviser at school reacted as though I'd said I wanted to be a street-walker. In those days it was somehow thought to be a slightly tawdry profession. It was suggested that in order to make good use of my English I became a solicitor's clerk. So that's what I did. I joined a firm in the City and hated every second of it!'

Within six months he'd left for the lowest rung in the advertising world, working in the only position available as post boy. A year later he'd graduated to assistant production manager and was contributing articles to a client newspaper for pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson. Specimens of this work helped win him the job of assistant editor on a trade newspaper for the John Menzies newsagents and bookselling chain, News Trade Weekly. Eighteen months later the editor retired and Terence took over the chair.

`At that time I do believe I was the youngest editor in Fleet Street,' he says. `At twenty I was looking after a 60,000 copy weekly. But even better, it was the world of magazines and books, I had the opportunity to interview many of my literary heroes like Francis Clifford, John Braine, Gavin Lyall, James Leasor and Hammond Innes.'

Strong then wrote his second novel North of Capricorn. Robert Hale saw it and asked to look at it again once he'd halved the length. And although he went through the whole exercise, including paying for the entire MS to be typed, he decided it wasn't good enough and never did resubmit it.
He was then invited to become the publicity manager for Four Square Paperbacks which then published the great Harold Robbins. For the first time he became fascinated with modern military history after promoting the film-tie in with Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day about the D-Day invasion. But two years later he was fired - although technically he resigned - for failing to meet the chairman's decree for a prompt nine-thirty start.
There followed a seven year period of self employment, ranging from freelance journalism and photography to advertising and public relations. During that period he took up modern wargaming as a hobby interest and studied all aspects of warfare in the air, at sea and on land, and special forces operations in particular which brought him into contact with former members of the SAS.
In 1977 he joined a public relations company, McKenzie, Newton & Nicholson, the latter of whom had just been murdered by the Provisional IRA in Belfast. Mr Nicholson had apparently been mistaken for the managing director of one of their client companies. Strathern Audio was a state-of the-art audio company set up in West Belfast with government investment.
After just nine months Strong was made redundant and spent three months writing Whisper Who Dares (his first thriller which was set in Northern Ireland and featured, for the first time in fiction, SAS operations against the Provisional IRA) before taking up his next appointment.
Yet it was to be two years later, after the Iranian Embassy siege, before he finally submitted the manuscript. It was published in 1982 and is now in its l8th impression. His second book The Fifth Hostage about a rescue mission to Iran was written in just six months. It was planned in detail with the help of former SAS personnel, detailed pilot maps and masses of desk research, His Iranian advisors congratulated him on the authenticity of his creation, but Strong was not happy with such second-and third-hand methods of research.
Since then he has managed to visit the majority of his locations, This was later to lead to him being mistaken for a mercenary in The Gambia, West Africa, when a second coup was expected; living in a snow hole with the Royal Marines at -40C in Norway (after which he took up cross-country skiing as a hobby); bluffing his way into the closed desert society of the Sultanate of Oman (where he learned and hated scuba diving) and to civil war-torn Mozambique in the heart of Renamo bandit country.

'Before I went I wanted to be able to pick up any type of weapon and fire it. Through contacts I managed to get familiar with everything from revolvers and automatics to rifles and sub-machine guns. But when I got there all I had available was an AK47 Kalashnikov without a magazine - a glorified club! I was mortified.'

Travels have taken him from the United States, Europe and Russia in the Cold War days to Africa, the Middle East and most recently (for White Viper) South America, including Colombia and the remote and dangerous coca-growing regions of the Amazonias.
In 1986 a major heroin-smuggling operation involving the IRA formed the basis for Dragonplague, although Terence Strong had a high-level meeting at New Scotland Yard with the Drug and Anti-Terrorist Squads and Customs before putting pen to paper. Shortly after the book was published, the real-life cover operation - a major abattoir and meat packing business in central Eire- went into voluntary liquidation and several East End criminals were arrested. However an Irish High Court judge took out a libel action against Strong and his publishers over the book which was finally settled out of court.
Later Strong was impersonated by a Yorkshireman passing himself off as a former Para and SAS officer. `He bought a lot of books and signed them on my behalf,' Strong recalls. `Good for sales, but not for my reputation. He was a one for the ladies, borrowed a lot of money from them and then disappeared with it.' However the man was finally brought `to book' and sentenced.
For his bestseller The Tick Tock Man, Strong attended the Army's terrorist bomb disposal school in England and personally toured the front-line EOD bases in Northern Ireland with `Top Cat', the senior bomb disposal commander in the province. Elements of both Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries agreed to give their views on the political situation which Strong attempted to portray fairly and accurately in his fictional `peace talks' - which proved the be devastatingly prophetic.
His list of contacts who have become friends and acquaintances today cover the entire spectrum of thriller writing: police and customs specialists, hostage negotiators, bodyguards and contract soldiers, mercenaries, former members of the CIA and British intelligence services, private investigators, lawyers, all arms of the military, and professional assassins.
It's all come a long way from the childish imagination fuelled by the bomb-sites of post-war London and running from the keepers in Battersea Park.

Publishing History,
Terence Strong's first thriller Whisper Who Dares was published as a paperback original in 1982 and was the first ever novel to go behind the scenes with the SAS who had just come into the public eye.
Yet the manuscript had been completed in handwritten form (the way the author still writes his first and second drafts) in 1978 and lay discarded in a drawer awaiting typing. Following the Iranian Embassy siege in London in 1980, he dusted it off and sent copies to four publishers. Hodder & Stoughton snapped it up for special publication in Coronet paperback.
Published at the height of the Falklands War, it became an instant bestseller and is now in its l8th edition and still selling. Being a paperback original, there were few press reviews, although a reviewer on the Glasgow Evening Times was quick to declare: `This is the best thriller I've read in a long time!'
Sales of Terence Strong's next eight thrillers were to exceed a million copies in the UK alone.
A second paperback original followed swiftly, The Fifth Hostage, detailing a daring SAS mission into the Iran of Ayatollah Khomeini which the author planned after reading nine books on the country and enlisting the help of former SAS personnel to plot the mission with total authenticity.
'One gets to feel this really is what the inner workings of the SAS are like' said The Bookseller, later reporting it at the No.4 Top Ten Position. It made No.6 according to the Daily Express, No.3 in Publishing News and No.1 itself in CTN, the newsagents trade magazine.
With Conflict of Lions Terence Strong further developed the 'hands-on' research that was to become his trade mark by visiting West Africa and travelling to the upper reaches of the river Gambia to collect material for a classic tale of guerrilla warfare and counter-revolution.
`No one can cram in the action like Strong' decided the Glasgow Evening Times and the Gloucester Citizen commented: 'The great thing about Terence Strong is his talent for frightening credibility. Everything in this story could happen - and probably has, somewhere.'
The accidental discovery of real-life links between heroin-trafficking and the Provisional IRA led to the author's first non-SAS story Dragonplague although he retained a fallen ex-military hero. Due to its topicality it was published simultaneously in hardback and paperback editions.
Over fifty press, TV and radio interviews resulted from the revelations including a front page lead in Sunday Independent and a sensationalised expose in the Sunday Sport. The Sunday Express review was more measured: 'Mr Strong's story races along, action-crammed with violence and sex, yet he manages to inject his story with all the tragedy of heroin abuse as well as the brutal cynicism of the villains behind the racket. His extensive research is frightening.' And 'A superior action story' decided the Peterborough Evening Telegraph. `Sort of paces which keeps the pages turning at a fast clip’ said Tim Heald in The Times.
By the time he returned to his SAS theme in That Last Mountain - combining a classic espionage and love story with high adventure in the icy Scandanavian wilderness - his following of fans amongst press reviewers was growing strongly.
'Breathless entertainment with a wryly realistic finish' claimed Matthew Coady in The Guardian and Christopher Wordsworth in The Observer declared it to be 'An expert miasma of treachery and suspicion building to a thrilling climax.'
Others were equally impressed: 'Rating AA+' (Publishing News); 'A writer of the there's-no-substitute for-experience school' (Daily Telegraph); 'Packed with tension and drama' (Northern Echo); 'A punishing a nerve-shredding chase across the treacherous and icy wilderness' (Liverpool Echo); 'Anyone who knows the Arctic will find his action hard to fault. He is equally strong on characterisation with heroes as flawed as they are in real life' (Guernsey Evening Press) and 'A thrilling, compelling novel' (Huddersfield Daily Examiner).
From ice and snow, Strong next swept his readers off to the desert of Oman in Sons Of Heaven, swapping skis for scuba-gear and flippers, linking piracy by Iranian terrorists in the Arabian Gulf with nerve-chewing hostage negotiations in London.
'Must be contender for Best Thriller of 1990' declared the Guernsey Evening Press. 'His research is always so meticulous that the fiction comes to life - you really feel as if it could happen' said the Western Morning News and the Liverpool Daily Post agreed: 'Meticulous detail is woven in neatly but never takes the pace out of a tight plot with a realistic finish.'
'Belongs to the action-man school of writing backed up hands on research,' said The Times and the Sunday Telegraph acclaimed it as 'Well-plotted and genuinely exciting.' Others went along: 'A most powerful up-to-the-minute thriller' (Manchester Evening News) and 'Terrific!' (Oxford Mail). It was back to Africa with This Angry Land, but this time to war-torn Mozambique in the south-east of the continent. The author scored a double whammy with this tale with Karen Smyth Oracle declaring: `Superbly written, this is an enthralling and poignant read'
Its accurate portrayal of contemporary events and life in the country inspired an Oxford professor to use the book as the basis of a 10,000 word address to academic experts in refugee studies from around the world at a meeting in New York.
Yet the Peterborough Evening Telegraph obviously saw another side of the story: 'A full bore blood, thunder and romance epic', as did the Western Morning News: `When the bullets begin to fly the non-stop action takes off with a vengeance. It's an easy read because of the strength of the writing, the compulsion of the tale and a savage but surprising climax.' And `Highlights the situation better than any television documentary ever could’ said the Newport Argus.
And it certainly won over the reviewer in Cambridgeshire Pride Magazine: `Strong writes a crisper story than Colin Forbes, has more depth than Alistair MacLean or Jack Higgins and with every book is proving himself the master of the big-scale action adventure story. This is as powerful as the very best of Wilbur Smith.' Stalking Horse followed, exploring the jumpy, nerve-shredding life of a man under deep cover to penetrate a terrorist organisation and combining it with spectacular action behind the lines in Iraq during the run up to the Gulf War.
More reviewers raved: `Reading this meant sleepless nights. I just couldn't lay it down. Great stuff' (Sunderland Echo); `When such a powerful plot combines with such sharply drawn characters the result is inevitable - an action packed page turner which defies the reader to put it down' (Yorkshire Evening Post); `I held my breath through this terrific thriller. Splendidly researched, excitingly written and terrifyingly prophetic. A must for a movie' (Dorset Evening Echo).
The Western Mail reviewed Stalking Horse alongside John Le Carre's The Night Manager: `Terence Strong is rather less well known than John Le Carre and yet of the two books I found Stalking Horse the most satisfying. Mr Strong's narrative is faster and more gripping without losing authenticity. It is a thoroughbred of a tale that stays the distance. While Mr Le Carre's is a well-constructed story, I found his 'baddies' less convincing than those in Stalking Horse.' While the national Today’s verdict by Sarah Broadhurst was: `This tale of daring and downright cunning culminates in a thrilling climax. For your action novel and authentic thriller, Terence Strong is hard to beat.'
The author moved to Heinemann-Mandarin for his last book The Tick Tock Man, which plunged the reader into the unfamiliar world of terrorist bomb disposal in Belfast and London.
WH Smith selected the hardback for one of its twenty-four special promotions in 1994 and it outsold the lot, leading to its choice as the `Hero' Paperback of the Month the following year. John Menzies picked it as Book of the Week and it was chosen to head a Readers Digest abridged edition.
It sold 11,000 in hardback (the author complains he hasn't even got a first edition himself!) and sold a 110,000 paperbacks in the first printing.
'Yet again an edge-of the-chair thriller with the chilling grip of authenticity,' said the Sunday Independent.

Bibliography
N.B. dates and publishers in dark red indicate British First Editions. Dates and publishers in black indicate recent reprints.

Cold Monday (Simon & Schuster, 2004) Pocket Books Pbk Aug 04

Deadwater Deep (Heinemann, 1998) Heinemann Jan 98

Rogue Element (Heinemann, 1997) Arrow Pbk 1998

White Viper (Heinemann, 1996) Mandarin Pbk 1997

Tick Tock Man (Heinemann, 1994)

Stalking Horse (Hodder & Stoughton, 1993)

This Angry Land (Hodder & Stoughton, 1992)

Sons of Heaven (Hodder & Stoughton, 1990)

That Last Mountain (Hodder & Stoughton, 1989)

Dragonplague (Hodder & Stoughton, 1987)

Conflict of Lions ( 1985)

The Fifth Hostage ( 1983)

Whisper Who Dares ( 1982)