Am excited to announce my new book – out in March 2024.

Here’s a bit more about it:

It’s a story that starts with the 1986 murder of a British spy inside the IRA.

Nobody was arrested at the time. But his death set in motion a process that led, thirty years later, to the largest murder investigation in British history. Its target? Another British spy, codenamed ‘Stakeknife’, believed to have carried out this murder and dozens more.

My book, Four Shots in the Night, is the story of what happened on the night of the murder, the role played in all this by Martin McGuinness, and the larger narrative of British intelligence in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. It is about trust and betrayal, love and death, a family’s search for the truth, and how far any spy should be allowed to go in the pursuit of intelligence. Over the last decade I’ve written three other books about spies, but this one is very different: I have never before explored a subject that’s so contemporary, and so raw. Nor have I taken on a story that moves me as much as this one, in ways that I’m still trying to figure out.

Four Shots in the Night is out towards the end of March. I can’t wait for you to read it.

Coming soon…

A quick update: Our Man in New York will be released in the UK in all its different formats on Thursday 5 September. For the kindlers out there, it is available as an ebook; for those who prefer paper, it will be out in hardback; and anyone who wants to hear me reading it out can download or stream the audiobook.

Some news…

My next book will be about the undercover British campaign to bring the US into the Second World War, and the enigmatic man at the heart of it, Bill Stephenson (pictured above). This is the same Stephenson made famous by the book A Man Called Intrepid, or infamous, you could say, on account of the book’s endless exaggerations and inaccuracies.

I’ve been wanting to write this book for years, partly because I’ve heard stories about Stephenson since I was a child. As I’ll explain in the book, shortly before the Second World War he saved my Dad’s life.

I’d know about that for a long time, but it was only in the wake of the last US presidential election, and the subsequent revelations about a nationwide Russian influence campaign, that I felt now was the time to write about this earlier British operation.

It turns out that the largest influence campaign ever launched on American soil was not run from Moscow. It was run out of the Rockefeller Center, it was British, and it peaked in the weeks before the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

The book will be published in Autumn 2019 by PublicAffairs in the US as Agents of Influence, and in the UK as Our Man in New York, where it will be published by Quercus.

Now I’ve just got to write it.