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

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