“We want you to lay a ghost,” Frances Fitzgibbon is told as she is ordered to investigate the past of her superior, Colonel Jack Butler, at a decisive moment in his career. But why? For as Colonel Butler pursues an elusive IRA/KGB assassin, Frances finds herself confronting dangerous questions, as more than one spectre is raised from the dark past.

In the rural peace of modern England, a war game recreates the slaughter of the Civil War. But when the battle ends, a real corpse is left it the Swine Brook; and an aristocratic but impoverished revolutionary claims to have found a cache of "Cromwell's Gold".When David Audley is called in, 17th-century secrets and the deadly game of modern espionage clash in a brilliantly intricate thriller of bluff and counterbluff.

A few weeks after D-Day, the German army in the West is retreating, with the British and the Americans in hot pursuit. But Major O'Conor, ex-liaison officer with the Yugoslav Partisans, is conducting his own private war. As he leads his hand-picked team of ruthless fighters deep behind enemy lines, it becomes clear that he regards French Resistance units and British Intelligence agents as more dangerous to his mission than the Germans.

A brilliant young electronics expert is killed by a car bomb seemingly meant for the head of the Foreign Office's Middle-Eastern Section. Intelligence officer Hugh Roskill is sent by David Audley on an investigation that takes him from London club-land to the Hampshire countryside, and deep into the complexities of Middle Eastern politics, to find the answer to two questions: who was the real target of the bomb? And what is Alamut?

What does the chairman of the new Atlantic Defence Committee have to do with the American Civil War? And why was a top CIA trouble-shooter needed as a middleman - a middleman looking for David Audley, senior analyst for British Intelligence? It all seems very wrong to Oliver St John Latimer, but it does present an interesting opportunity. Unfortunately for the ambitious and usually desk-bound Latimer, the opportunity is twice as deadly as it is intriguing.