Night Heron

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What to expect

Tell them, the Night Heron is hunting . . .

A lone man escapes a labour camp in the dead of night, fleeing across the winter desert of north-west China.

Two decades earlier, he was a spy for the British. Now he finds Beijing transformed and crawling with danger - the fugitive must quickly disappear on its surveillance-blanketed streets or face death.

Desperate and ruthless, he reaches out to his one-time MI6 paymasters via journalist Philip Mangan, offering secrets in return for his life.

Mangan is dragged into a deeper and deeper whirlpool of lies, as the secrets prove more valuable than either of them could ever have known... and not only to the British.

Critics Review

An intriguing, skilful and taut novel...elegantly plotted and with a piercing eye for detail
Daily Mail
Debut of the month is Adam Brookes's accomplished Night Heron
The Sunday Times
Brookes arrives as a fully formed talent, with a complete mastery of the genre
Daily Express
Night Heron reeks with verisimilitude in its settings and atmosphere, and is accompanied by a cleverly plotted action-filled story of Anglo-Chinese espionage
The Times
The pace is frenetic and Brookes does a wonderful job with both the high-tech world of cyber intelligence and survival on Beijing's gritty, smog-smothered streets. Highly recommended.
The Bookseller
Brookes, a correspondent for BBC News in Washington, D.C., who was formerly based in China, takes readers deep inside the culture and daily routines of that country in his outstanding fiction debut . . . Good chase scenes and tense dialogue, coupled with a convincing picture of what actually happens in the corridors of power, make Brookes a thriller writer to watch.
Publishers Weekly
Brookes, a one-time China correspondent for the BBC, knows this turf exceedingly well and translates that knowledge into a novel that is as strikingly different as it is thrilling . . . One of the best and most compulsively readable spy-fiction debuts in years.
Kirkus
Night Heron is a fascinating portrait of the dangerous complexities of spying in a restricted country, the competing agendas driving international intelligence, and China's startlingly varied social realities. A must-read for fans of espionage and smart global fiction in general.
Booklist
Engrossing and compelling
LA Review of Books
Fans of the international espionage genre will inhale this fast tale in a few suspenseful breaths. Brookes uses multiple narrators-the spy, the engineer, the journalist, the agent, the boss-whose conflicting alliances tell the real story.
Library Journal
Spine-tingling
APN Network

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