The Suicide Club
For all readers of Robert Harris, William Boyd and John le Carre, The Suicide Club is a First World War spy thriller set in Occupied Belgium in 1917, and tells the dark, disturbing and untold story of the shadow espionage battle fought behind the lines. Andrew Williams is 'in the front rank of English thriller writers' (Daily Mail) and his novels possess 'a richness of characterisation and intelligence that few thrillers can match' (Sunday Times).
August 1917. Britain is mired in bloody stalemate on the Western Front and questions are being asked in government about the leadership of the army. Soldier spy Sandy Innes is summoned from his undercover work in Belgium by the new Secret Service to investigate. Officially transferred to Field Marshal Haig's headquarters in France to prepare agents for the next big push, his secret mission is to spy on Haig's intelligence chiefs.
At GHQ, no one is interested in Innes's inside knowledge. Instead, he is attached to an advance assault group dubbed 'The Suicide Club'. His fellow intelligence officers have little faith in the top secret information being fed to Haig by their superior, and as Innes digs deeper he begins to suspect treachery. The stakes could not be higher: the fate of hundreds of thousands of British soldiers.
In a tense race against time, against the background of political machinations in government and at GHQ, Innes must survive membership of The Suicide Club, and then risk all by going back behind enemy lines to uncover the truth.
Readers also enjoyed
Andrew Williams
Born Sheffield in 62, brought up in Lincolnshire, after studying English at Oxford I worked for ten years as a senior current affairs producer with the BBC, covering the big international stories of the day. My programme on the massacre at Srebrenica in 1995 was shortlisted for an Emmy and used in evidence at the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague. For the next ten years, I wrote and directed historical documentaries for the BBC and international co-producers, including an award winning series, ‘The Battle of the Atlantic’, and I wrote a couple of bestselling accounts of Second World War campaigns, ‘The Battle of the Atlantic’, and ‘D-Day to Berlin’, to accompany TV productions of the same name. My first novel, The Interrogator, was shortlisted for the Ian Fleming Thriller of the Year Award and the Ellis Peters Historical Fiction Award, and it was The Daily Mail’s debut thriller of 2009. The second, To Kill A Tsar, was one of The Mail’s thrillers of 2010 and was shortlisted for The Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the Ellis Peters Award. My 1960’s espionage thriller, Witchfinder, was one of The Times Literary Supplement Books of the Year. The Daily Mail was decent enough to describe me as ‘as one of Britain’s most accomplished thriller writers’, and The Times Literary Supplement noted that ‘if le Carré needs a successor, Williams has all the equipment for the role.’ Very gratifying. But as you can imagine from the above, getting the history right is especially important to me: history thrillers are my thing!
More books by Andrew Williams
