Witchfinder
London 1963. The Beatles, Carnaby Street, mini-skirts. But the new mood hasn't reached the drab and fearful corridors of MI5 and MI6. Many agents joined the secret service to fight the Nazis. Now they are locked in a Cold War against the Russians.
And some of them are traitors.
The service has been shaken to its core by the high-profile defections of Cambridge-educated spies Burgess, MacLean and now Philby. Appalled at such flagrant breaches of British security, the Americans are demanding a rigorous review.
Harry Vaughan is brought back from Vienna to be part of it. The Chief asks him to join two investigators - Arthur Martin and Peter Wright - who are determined to clean out the stables, and the first target of their suspicions is the Deputy Director General of MI5, Graham Mitchell.
Harry hooks up with an old flame, Elaine, and joins the hunt - somewhat reluctantly. He is sceptical of the case against Mitchell and wary of the messianic fervour of the two spycatchers. But the further the investigation goes, the greater the sense of paranoia and distrust that spreads through the 'wilderness of mirrors' that is the secret service.
The only certainty is that no-one is above suspicion.
Including Harry Vaughan.
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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!
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