From Joseph Kanon, author of the award-winning Los Alamos, comes an espionage novel set at the height of Cold War paranoia, The Prodigal Spy.

The Observer described Los Alamos as 'an espionage novel that brilliantly captures the burgeoning cold-war paranoia', and in Joseph Kanon's second novel he has again masterfully recreated an era when East and West were no longer at war but were embroiled in something far more insidious: a murderous secretive game where the stakes were equally high and the weapons of stealth, suspicions and silence were just as deadly.
Waiter Kotlar is the epitome of the American dream, the son of working class immigrants who attends Yale and becomes part of the establishment. He seems an unlikely communist, but before his hearing with the Committee on Un-American Activities is concluded he has disappeared - defected to the East. Nineteen years later his son, Nick, receives a message that his father wants to see him in Prague. He is horrified, repelled - and intrigued. At first Nick refuses to go, until he realises that the message is a coded cry for help...
Accompanied by Molly, the beautiful journalist who has brought his father's message, Nick embarks on a clandestine mission to Czechoslovakia, to find a man who is old and dying - and who wants to come home. But Waiter Kotlar is no longer important enough to merit anyone's help. And therein lies the crux of the matter. He never was important: so why did the communists bring him out of America? The only reason, he tells Nick, was to protect someone else, someone infinitely more important - someone about whom he knows everything, except his name.
The Prodigal Spy is a novel of high suspense and intriguing sensibility, a novel that I guarantee you won't be able to put down.

Praise for Joseph Kanon's first novel Los Alamos, which was an international bestseller:
'A profoundly serious as well as grippingly entertaining novel' Allan Massie
'An espionage novel that brilliantly captures the burgeoning cold-war paranoia' The Observer
'Accomplished and beautifully written' Sunday Telegraph
'Enthralling ... a dream of a novel' Time Out

Encouraged by his fourteen-year-old-daughter who recognises his lonely widowhood, Bob Naylor decides to join a writers' circle, believing he might gain some expert help with the poetry which keeps spilling out of his imagination. He discovers a motley collection of wannabe authors who he doubts he has anything in common with, but just as he is deciding not to formally join the group he learns that a publisher who addressed their last meeting has been killed and he stays to see what might develop. The Senior Investigating Officer, Henrietta Mallin, soon has all the members of the group under suspicion and under pressure from her superiors arrests their Chairman. Bob, the only writer who had not met the dead man, is persuaded by some other members of the group to do some investigating of his own. And that is when the trouble really starts, because another death turns the spotlight of suspicion on to him.

Peter Lovesey's first novel Wobble To Death introduced the redoubtable Victorian policemen, Cribb and Thackeray. He won the Gold Dagger Award with The False Inspector Dew and in 2000 joined the elite group of people awarded the Cartier Diamond Dagger Award.

Valerie O'Connor comes from a large, close- knit, working class family in Vermont. At the age of eighteen, she marries twenty-five-year-old Jack Marsh. He is a handsome, dashing Korean War veteran, but he is also a damaged man who cannot keep himself from taking his fears and insecurities out on his wife and his five children.
To make matters worse, Jack takes Valerie away from her family, and all the way across the country, isolating her from the very people who know her and care about her the most. Too proud to ask for help or admit her failure as a wife and mother, Valerie is unable to protect either herself or the children. One by one, pushed to the extreme, the children escape, in one fashion or another, until they are all gone, even Ricky, the youngest and perhaps the most troubled, and there is only Jack left, and Valerie must face the reality of her marriage and her life. And then, as if out of the ashes, another generation begins.
Will history repeat itself? The answer is a message for us all.