In the fourth title of Anthony Price's gripping spy series, British Intelligence officer David Audley slips away to Italy without authorisation, taking his wife with him. Immediately the suspicion arises that he may have defected, and the head of Italian security also becomes interested in his arrival, particularly as it has flushed from cover a rogue communist. But Audley has his own reasons for leaving Britain, in an investigation that becomes a matter of life or death.

“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.

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.

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.

Even in the era of glasnost, a defector is worth having, especially if he is a senior computer specialist in Russian military intelligence. But when the defection goes wrong, the British are left with three bodies and two inadequate clues to the nature of the information they might have been offered, and which now lies buried somewhere in the collective memories of David Audley and his one-time colleague Major Peter Richardson.