About Manhunt (An Agent Paul Richter Thriller)
First in a series about a British navy veteran who goes to work for the secret service to bring down a defector threatening Britain’s national security.
Nobody is ever above suspicion in the ‘wilderness of mirrors’ that is the world of intelligence, but when a senior officer goes bad it still hurts. When that senior officer can’t be identified, it hurts even more. Conventional detective work to unmask him is going to be too slow, and probably unreliable, so an alternative strategy has to be formulated. With the security of Britain’s most secret computer system at stake, and trust a commodity in short supply, a deception operation is set in train to flush out the traitor. Paul Richter, an unemployed ex-Naval aviator, is the unwitting and ultimately expendable bait in the trap. But as the net closes around the traitor in France, a female Russian intelligence officer flees Moscow and the evidence she brings points the finger of suspicion in a very different direction. With time running out, and nobody he can trust, Richter finds himself battling against both the British security establishment and trained teams of Russian assassins with orders to kill both him and the woman he’s trying to protect.
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Learn More About The Author
James Barrington was born in Cambridge and after an extraordinarily undistinguished academic career worked in a somewhat bizarre selection of jobs, including in a supermarket, in a petrol station, on a production line in a local factory, as a hospital porter, a driver and in a mortuary, before finally seeing the light and joining the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm as a helicopter pilot. That went rather less well than he had expected, as he suffered a detached retina in one eye probably caused by one bout too many of basic fixed-wing aerobatics. This curtailed his flying career. He transferred to Air Traffic Control, statistically much safer than flying any kind of aircraft, and stuck it out for over twenty years.
Leaving the service, he decamped with his wife and two dogs to the Principality of Andorra in the Pyrenean mountains on the reasonable grounds that somebody there had offered him a job and the expression ‘income tax’ didn’t appear in the Andorran lexicon. Living on his wits, abilities and somewhat niggardly Royal Navy pension, all of which proved barely adequate to ensure his survival, he began bombarding UK literary agents with manuscripts. To his surprise, in 2003 one agent agreed to represent him, and to his even greater surprise the next year Macmillan published his first ‘Paul Richter’ thriller. Almost 40 books later, he’s also been published by Penguin, Simon & Schuster, Transworld and others in the UK, and in multiple languages in other countries, writing in a variety of genres and using several different names.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, ‘James Barrington’ is a pseudonym because his real name, Peter Stuart Smith, is dull and boring.