Soho Crime to Release JACK OF SPIES by David Downing

It is 1913 at the beginning of Jack of Spies (Soho Crime | May, 2014) and a globe-trotting luxury automobile salesman named Jack McColl is putting his military background and ear for languages to work for the fledgling Royal Navy intelligence services. The world is on the brink of calamity, as the UK, Germany, and Europe inch closer to the First World War and Jack is about to find himself a player on the biggest of stages.

It starts out simple enough. While in China showing the spectacular bottle green Maya automobile to the wealth of empires, Jack takes strolls around the harbor to note the coming and going of ships, snaps the occasional photo, and even pays prostitutes to tell him the pillow talk of the German navy. The Royal Navy's pay isn't enough to retire on, but it is extra, and Jack is living out a lifelong fantasy as an agent of the British Empire.

But Jack's sporting interest in spy-craft soon leads him deep into a deadly game of cat and mouse with profound strategic implications for the Empire. It hasn't always been about god and country for Jack and as the stakes get higher, his Majesty's service is asking increasingly questionable things of him. His passionate love affair with an American suffragette and journalist named Caitlin Hanley is sincere, yet Jack can't help but realize that at some point he may have to betray her confidence. Caitlin is from a long line of Irish independence activists, and her journalism often shows signs of sympathy to Irish and Indian revolutionary causes-two political movements the Germans are willing to exploit to further destabilize the British Empire. They're also two causes that Jack is not without his own sympathies for.

About David Downing