'Deighton's best book ... an absorbingly exciting spy story that is also a fascinating exercise in might-have-been speculation' The New York Times Book Review

It is 1941 and Germany has won the war. Britain is occupied, Churchill executed and the King imprisoned in the Tower of London. At Scotland Yard, Detective Inspector Archer tries to do his job and keep his head down. But when a body is found in a Mayfair flat, what at first appears to be a routine murder investigation sends him into a world of espionage, deceit and betrayal.

'Len Deighton is the Flaubert of contemporary thriller writers ... this is much the way things would have turned out if the Germans had won' The Times Literary Supplement

About the Author
Len Deighton was born in 1929 in London. He did his national service in the RAF, went to the Royal College of Art and designed many book jackets, including the original UK edition of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. The enormous success of his first spy novel, The IPCRESS File (1962), was repeated in a remarkable sequence of books over the following decades. These varied from historical fiction (Bomber, perhaps his greatest novel) to dystopian alternative fiction (SS-GB) and a number of brilliant non-fiction books on the Second World War (Fighter, Blitzkrieg and Blood, Tears and Folly). His spy novels chart the twists and turns of Britain and the Cold War in ways which now give them a unique flavour. They preserve a world in which Europe contains many dictatorships, in which the personal can be ruined by the ideological and where the horrors of the Second World War are buried under only a very thin layer of soil. Deighton's fascination with technology, his sense of humour and his brilliant evocation of time and place make him one of the key British espionage writers, alongside John Buchan, Eric Ambler, Ian Fleming and John Le Carre.

Reviews
Len Deighton is the Flaubert of the contemporary thriller writers. -- Michael Howard * Times Literary Supplement *
Deighton's best book ... an absorbingly exciting spy story that is also a fascinating exercise in might-have-been speculation. -- Julian Symons * New York Times Book Review *

Horrifyingly plausible.

* The Independent *
They don't, as they say, write them like this anymore. You will be entertained, informed, thrilled and dazzled. Long may he, and his creations, live on. * The Guardian *



Book Information
ISBN 9780241505526
Author Len Deighton
Format Paperback
Page Count 352
Imprint Penguin Classics
Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
Weight(grams) 258g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 129mm * 20mm