The Deceiver

Sam McCready serves Britain as Chief of Covert Operations for the Secret Intelligence Service. He's competent, dedicated, in his prime. Why then this push to get him out? The options are painful -- early retirement or an administrative backwater. But he has one other option: it's a wild card, confrontational, risky. Risky because McCready knows too much. He senses the move is more about destabilizing SIS than settling a score with him. Who wants him out, and why? And what happens if he refuses to go quietly?

Bestselling author Frederick Forsyth follows the success of his latest work, The Negotiator, with this major thriller rich in color and suspense. Longtime British Intelligence ...

Kirkus Reviews

Forsyth's stalwart tribute to the spies who came in from the cold: four thriller-novellas featuring the intrigues of British superagent Sam McCready. With the cold war over, the Foreign Office has decided to retire its veteran spies, beginning with McCready, the "deceiver"—head of Britain's disinformation desk since 1983. McCready balks, demanding a hearing at which his assistant relates four of McCready's most daring exploits. The first and longest, "Pride and Extreme Prejudice," is at once the most suspenseful and melancholic. Here, McCready, having "turned" a top Russian general, sends spy-pal Bruno Morenz into East Germany to accept the Russian's latest gift—the Soviet Army War Book; but, unknown to McCready, Morenz has just killed a cheating mistress and is cracking up. When the East Germans catch on to Morenz, who panics into hiding, McCready must sneak across the Iron Curtain, find Morenz, retrieve the book, and deal—irrevocably—with his friend. Also subtly shaded with the grays of spydom is "The Price of the Bride," in which McCready learns from a pro-West Soviet source that the CIA's new prize, defecting KGB colonel Pyotr Orlov, is actually a double agent bent on falsely implicating a top CIA-man as a Soviet mole. It's a masterful spy-vs.-spy battle of wits as McCready sets out to unmask the Russian and save the marked Yank. Less enthralling but still offering solid action and brilliant local color are the two final tales, with McCready acting pivotal but minor roles as he displays his prowess against non-Soviet threats. In "A Casualty of War," he foils an IRA-Qaddafi gun- running scheme, while in the semi-humorous "A Little Bit of Sunshine," he foils aCuban takeover of a Caribbean island. Not a sizzler like The Day of the Jackal or even The Negotiator (1989) but more resonant than either, with shades of le Carr and Deighton: sophisticated, shrewd, roundly satisfying spy- stuff. (Book-of-the-Month Split Main Selection for November)

As an intrepid and inventive field agent, McCready's independent style has often driven him beyond the rules. He has not been afraid to press the CIA to the explosion point - or to play cat-and-mouse with the KGB. He has successfully tricked Qaddafi and the IRA and once even set himself up as governor of a remote Caribbean island torn between Fidel Castor and the Colombian drug trade. But times have changed and mavericks like McCready are an endangered species. Now, before a panel of his peers, McCready must defend his unorthodox exploits or face dismissal. What hangs in the balance is not only his own career, but the very future of British intelligence. The changing face of contemporary espionage is presented through the struggle between an old-style freewheeling British intelligence officer and the enemy determined to utilize new policy directives to force him into retirement