The Orford Ness Reckoning: Ben Friar File #1

Book One of the Ben Friar FilesAn island that appears on no chart. A weapon no one will name. A peace the whole world is holding its breath for.On a veranda six thousand miles from the cold, Benedict Friar has almost learnt how to be a man on holiday. Then a dry, well-tailored stranger comes up the hill with a thin file and a single quiet question - and the holiday is over.Somewhere off a forgotten coast lies an island that exists on no map, run by people who collect dangerous things and the dangerous men who make them. The Service believes a weapon is being built there - something that could unmake a peace the world has spent a decade praying for - and they are sending Friar in to find it and bring it home. He is, they assure him, the perfect instrument for the work. They are more right than they will say.But Friar was remade once himself, eleven years ago, in a small quiet room on a gloomy shore, and the men who built him left one flaw they could not burn out: he can never be quite sure that what he feels is his own. On the island - with a beautiful smile waiting across the baccarat table, a girl in a silver car who is genuinely dangerous and entirely pointless, and a red number counting down toward something no one will say aloud - that single doubt becomes the only thing standing between a peacemaker and the grave. And Friar cannot know, until the last possible second, which way it will make him move.Cool, glittering and patient, The Orford Ness Reckoning opens the Ben Friar Files - spy fiction in the tradition of Fleming and le Carré, for readers who like their agents elegant, their villains soft-spoken, and their loyalties impossible to be sure of.Written by Cyril Barlow.