Here’s a quick update on my books – there’s quite a lot happening in the next couple of months. On April 1, Ulverscroft in the UK will publish a large-print hardback edition of Song of Treason. This is the second Paul Dark novel, which was originally published as Free Country but had its title changed. The book is set primarily in Rome, Sardinia and Istanbul: The Times called it ‘a taut and tortured exploration of betrayal on the national, ideological and personal levels simultaneously’, ‘a cleverly twisted tale of intrigue and deception’ and ‘a masterly excursion back to the bad old days of the Cold War’. You can read another review of it here. Song of Treason will also be published as a Kindle ebook in the UK on April 5. On April 12, Simon & Schuster will publish the third Paul Dark novel, The Moscow Option, in the UK, in mass-market paperback and ebook editions. The initial plan was to publish this in February, but for various reasons the date was changed to April – so please ignore listings for the book on Amazon and elsewhere with the old date, as that edition no longer exists. The Moscow Option is set in the Soviet Union and Finland in October 1969, and features sunken U-boats, a hunter-killer unit chasing Dark through icebound forests and a countdown to the end of the world. Like Free Agent and Song of Treason, it’s based around real historical events. The jacket is an atmospheric shot of an overcoated Dark trudging through snowy Moscow.
In the US, Penguin are taking a different tack. On May 29, they will publish all three Dark novels – which form a trilogy – in an omnibus paperback edition, titled The Dark Chronicles (it will also be available as an ebook). This has great jacket art evoking pulp thrillers from the Cold War era. To see the artwork in greater detail, just click on the thumbnails.
In the meantime, I’m hard at work on my first non-fiction book, which is an investigation of the most exciting espionage operation of the Cold War: MI6 and the CIA’s joint handling of Colonel Oleg Penkovsky during the run-up to the building of the Berlin Wall and then the Cuban Missile Crisis. More details on that to come, so please watch this space, and follow me on Facebook and Twitter.