Overview

Set at the dawn of the Cold War, this posthumous novel was inspired by author Richard Miles' contemporaneous experiences and his personal acquaintance with notorious Soviet spy Donald Maclean and revised by his niece Jill Rose. Curiously, I had never seen a dead body up close before, despite having served in a naval cruiser on the Arctic convoys in the early years of the war. In September 1945, idealistic young naval Lieutenant Tom Davis is assigned by the British Embassy in Washington to investigate an apparent suicide. He becomes enmeshed in a daring scheme proposed by his charismatic superior Sylvan Ross to kidnap a leading nuclear scientist from Los Alamos and spirit him to Britain. As the plot unfolds, Tom is torn between his personal loyalty to Ross and his growing fear that his mentor is himself a Soviet spy. A close friend is killed, and an unexpected antagonist almost costs Tom his own life. Wrestling with moral issues for which there are no easy solutions, Tom lays his career and reputation on the line in the shocking finale.

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9781684337859

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Part spy thriller, part contemporary satire, part whodunnit with a dead body in the first sentence, Requiem for a Spy succeeds on all levels. It has the taut feel of an Eric Ambler thriller mixed with the authentic period dialogue of Somerset Maugham's Willie Ashenden spy series. -Andrew Roberts, author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny A novel of high tension [that] depicts divided loyalties, personalities split down the middle, a world of distorting mirrors and blurring screens; it is written with a sharp eye for telling detail, covers the ground at a fast pace and has some memorable descriptions. -Professor David Dilks, co-author: The Missing Dimension: Governments and the Intelligence Communities in the 20th Century

Part spy thriller, part contemporary satire, part whodunnit with a dead body in the first sentence, Requiem for a Spy succeeds on all levels. -Andrew Roberts, author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny A novel of high tension [that] depicts divided loyalties, personalities split down the middle, a world of distorting mirrors and blurring screens; it is written with a sharp eye for telling detail, covers the ground at a fast pace and has some memorable descriptions. -Professor David Dilks, co-author: The Missing Dimension: Governments and the Intelligence Communities in the 20th Century

Author Information

Richard Miles RNVR (1917-1997) served his country all his life, in the Royal Navy, the diplomatic and the civil service. Many years after his death his niece Jill Rose revised and edited the drafts of his unpublished novel Requiem for a Spy, which was inspired by his own experiences. Jill, who is retired, lives in Florida, and is the author of Nursing Churchill: Wartime Life from the Private Letters of Winston Churchill's Nurse.

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