Dead Spy Running »

JON STOCK, a former Delhi correspondent, works for the London Daily Telegraph, writes a column for the Week Magazine in India, and has contributed to BBC Radio. He is married, with three children, and lives in Wiltshire, UK.

Matching the style of le Carré with the high-energy action of Ludlum, Dead Spy Running comes racing out of the gate as the first in a fantastic new series.

From its breathtaking start at the London Marathon, Jon Stock sets a breakneck pace that marks him as a formidable new thriller writer. Dead Spy Running will captivate readers with a story that leaps from a bomb threat in London, to a secret CIA black site in Poland, and on to India, where a spectacular assassination plot threatens to throw world politics into chaos.

Publishers Weekly

Veteran British newsman Stock (The Riot Act) fuses the cerebral complexity and cool prose of early le Carré with a tough, smart hero modeled on Jason Bourne in this excellent spy thriller, the first in a projected trilogy. Disgraced MI6 agent Daniel Marchant is running in the London Marathon with his girlfriend, Leila, also an MI6 agent, when he notices a South Asian man in the pack wearing a disguised suicide bomber's belt. When Marchant realizes they are near the American ambassador, another marathon runner, Marchant with Leila's aid does what he has to do to prevent the bombing. This act of bravery, unfortunately, leads to Marchant's falling under suspicion of being a terrorist himself. Foreign terrorists, an MI6 mole, and thugs aplenty populate the pages, but it is the ongoing war between the British and American spy agencies that's the inflammatory heart of this suspenseful, elegantly written novel. (Nov.)