WRITEALOT: Czechoslovakia

Showing posts with label Czechoslovakia. Show all posts

Thursday, 4 September 2025

THE BORODINO SACRIFICE - Book review

Paul Phillips’s spy thriller The Borodino Sacrifice (published 2024) is the first book in the Chasing Mercury trilogy.

I can see why Phillips dedicated it in memory of Peter O’Donnell, author of the Modesty Blaise thrillers: the novel is fast-paced and introduces us to two characters who end up facing dangers together – in a similar manner to Modesty and Willie Garvin.

I’m a sucker for word-play in titles, chapter headings etc. There are four parts. 1 – Between the Lines; 2 – Behind the Curtain; 3 – Beneath the Ashes; 4 – Upon the Mountains. So we have four different yet relevant prepositions.

We start with US sergeant Sam Bradley protecting a Brit spy, Jones, in the Moravian forest when a violent altercation occurs between a partisans. Inevitably there’s plenty of action at this time of Cessation of Hostilities at the close of World War II in Europe. Czechoslovakia is a mess, with national militias, partisans, communists and anti-communist guerrillas on the rampage... Bradley’s observant and memory-scarred. ‘... the Red Army mechanics had the jeep repaired by midday. Bradley wished flesh and blood was as responsive’ (p155).

Jones wants Bradley to find one of his people who is missing: Ludmila Suková, codename ‘Mercury’. Usually called Mila. She is almost a force of nature. ‘... there was something else about her, something real and strangely potent’ (p241). Mila is a layered character, an enigma, somebody who never gives up, no matter what obstacles get in her way. Like many spies, she used a poem to encrypt her messages, reminiscent of Violette Szabo’s written for her by Leo Marks in 1941; Mila’s is by W.B. Yeats. Gradually, we learn of her backstory and it seems the past has come to define her. Mila is on a quest of her own.

Bradley’s quest takes him to Berlin where he witnesses the devastation as well as the amazing rubble-women clearing away the detritus of war. Where there are razed buildings there are bodies: ‘Summer heat – the dead were making themselves known’ (p76).

Phillips's power of description puts you in the scene: ‘Smoke caressed the cobwebbed roof-space. The derelict mill was poorly shuttered and dusty beams of late afternoon sun were slinking across the walls. (He) heard an insect trapped somewhere, and the ticking of a watch’ (p55). And: ‘The sinking sun had turned the windows of the terraced tenements to molten ingots’ (p216).

His action scenes are intense; you can almost hear the shell casings hit the ground. However, it is not all action. Sometimes there’s poignancy. One individual reflects: ‘His heart had been buoyed by the last blessing, the tenderness of a woman, even directed at a worm such as he – a traitor, a nothing, a black joke, a geography teacher in a land without place names or frontiers, on a continent with its populations upended, in a world where the maps were redundant’ (p58).

The story has depth and is well researched, brilliantly evoking this period of post-war confusion. The assassination attempt on Heydrich in 1942 is pertinent. Men from GRU, NKVD and Smersh are plotting and loyalties are tested in grey areas. Behind the scenes the future of Czechoslovakia is and its people is being determined...

At the end of the book the reader is quite breathless. Happily, as you will be aware from the first sentence, there are two more in the continuing saga of Bradley and Mila. (I suppose that constitutes being labelled as a ‘spoiler’ – both survive the tense travails of this book!)

Note:

Berlin's rubble-women are detailed in Volume 4 of my Collected Stories - 18 history tales, Codename Gaby.

Monday, 12 January 2015

Writing - Beginnings

How to start that novel is one of several perennial questions posed to writers – and even asked of writers by themselves! It’s particularly relevant to genre writers.

There is no right or wrong way, though certainly experience suggests there are good ways to start. Books published in the past were aimed at readers with perhaps more leisure time, so the authors could indulge themselves and ease the reader in gently, with description or even some philosophising.

Bloomsbury is publishing Dennis Wheatley’s many books in digital format (though controversially edited for the ‘modern reader and improved pace’…) Wheatley was a massive best-seller for about forty years. A good number of his books began like this:

The Duke de Richleau and Rex Van Ryn had gone into dinner at eight o’clock, but coffee was not served till after ten.

This doesn’t pull the reader in at all; but its familiarity seems somehow comforting: the heroes of so many adventures since The Forbidden Territory can still find time for a convivial evening – before the next adventure begins!

Nowadays, however, most experienced writers advocate not beginning a genre book with mundane events – a meal, for example, or the weather. Get into the action.

With short stories, that’s good advice too; where word-count is limited, there’s little room for atmosphere-building. I’ve tried to do that with my novels as well; here, for example, are the beginnings of four recent books:

Catalyst – 1^st in ‘The Avenging Cat’ series

Rock climbing was much easier than this, Cat Vibrissae thought. She did that for a hobby – though never at night – and enjoyed it. But climbing the outside of a modern building was something else. How those people could do it for fun was beyond her. What were they called? Stegophilists. Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates started it when they scaled the college buildings in the late 1800s – always at night. She was used to the adrenaline rush of climbing with bare hands and feet on cliffs above rugged rocks and aggressive waves. But this was very different. Tonight the effects seemed more pronounced: she was sure that she could feel the increased heart rate and her gut constricting. And her mouth was very dry. Still, if she was going to fulfil her vow to her father, she had no choice. This was the only way to penetrate the seventeenth floor office of Rick Barnes.

Catacomb- 2^nd in ‘The Avenging Cat’ series- due for e-book/paperback release 24 April

Despite the drizzle, due to the residual heat of the day the roof sent steam spiralling. A light breeze from the sea spat rain against Cat as she swung over the lip of the roof’s guttering. Suspended at full stretch, she landed with both feet on the narrow ledge. Her Nike soles provided sufficient purchase on the marble surface. She turned and straightened; her backpack pressed against the dark window. She was already drenched, her black jeans and cotton T-shirt clinging uncomfortably; tied in a ponytail, her dyed blonde hair would seem dark.

June was the start of summer here and the forecast had been accurate enough: halfway through the month and this was the second day that it had rained. Now, she looked around. The evenings were not dark. Chuck Marston, her instructor had inculcated into her that if she had a choice: when at risk of being in full view, she should scale a building in wet weather. Her target apartment block qualified in that regard, as it was on the Promenade des Anglais, overlooking the beach and the sea, so on this occasion the rain, while dispiriting, was welcome. It averted the inquisitive eyes of any passing pedestrians.

The Prague Papers- 1^st in the Tana Standish series

Six Soviet officers stood on the balcony overlooking St. Wenceslas Square and the definition through the sniper-scope was so good that Tana Standish could detect the blackheads round their noses and the blood-shot eyes that testified to late-night celebrating with alcohol. She had ten 7.5mm rounds, more than enough to kill all of them.

      Tana had a steady grip but there was no risk of weapon-shake anyway as the new Giat F1 rifle rested on its bipod on the windowsill. As this weapon was fresh from the French production line, it could not be traced back to England.
      Dressed in his brown-grey greatcoat with bright red lapel flashes, General of the Army Ivan Pavlovsky cocked his head to the left while he listened attentively to his commanders. He was thickset, with small dark eyes and a pug nose whose nostrils bristled with hair.
      Try as she might, she could not detect any thoughts from the officers. But she was able to lip-read. They were in a self-congratulatory mood, since the invasion had gone well, with only a few Czech and Slovak deaths. Vodka had indeed flowed last night.

The Tehran Text- 2^nd in the Tana Standish series – due for e-book release 6 Feb

Dressed in sinister black, SAVAK Captain Hassan Mokhtarian looked every inch the evil man he was. A man who deserved to die.

       Tana Standish could see him quite clearly through the telescopic sight, even making allowances for the poor light as dusk descended over Tehran and the city’s surrounding mountains, turning the overshadowing snow-capped cone of Mount Damavand a delicate shade of mauve. At least today the city smog didn’t obscure the peak of the volcano, which still belched out sulphurous fumes from time to time and killed the odd stray sheep.
        Hassan exuded an air of danger with his pitted complexion and deep-set ebony eyes under a prominent forehead ridge.
        Standing in the open doorway of his villa, he exhaled smoke through his nostrils and dropped the Marlboro cigarette to the lightly coloured marble-tiled step, grinding it under the toe of his boot. His eyes glinted, as if he took pleasure in the destruction of even small things.

https://www.facebook.com/events/1045640672129726/?ref_dashboard_filter=upcoming

***

You might also detect a few similarities running through each particular series – the climbing motif in the Cat books, and the gun-sight in the Tana books. A variation on the theme; echoes, if you will.

The Tana book beginnings are exposed further in an earlier post:

http://nik-writealot.blogspot.com.es/2014/03/recurrent-images-beginnings-and-echoes.html

So, my advice, for what it’s worth: begin with an event that grips the reader, poses questions, or conveys the tenor of the tale from the outset. Catalyst tells us immediately that Cat is on a dangerous mission, to fulfil a promise. Catacomb gives us more of the same, and highlights Cat’s expertise. Papers begins in 1968, Czechoslovakia, and shows us that Tana is a trained sniper and is capable of reading thoughts. Text emphasises Tana’s cold-blooded ability to target evildoers. I would hope that with a few words the reader is also placed in those tense scenes.

All of the above are/will be published by Crooked Cat Publishing, purchased from :

Amazon UK here

Amazon COM here

Wednesday, 26 November 2014

Release day for The Prague Papers

Today is the launch day of The Prague Papers, the first in the Tana Standish series.

Amazon UK - here

Amazon COM - here

It’s 1975 and Czechoslovakia’s people are still kicking against the Soviet invasion. Tana Standish, a British psychic spy, is called in to repair the underground network. But there’s a traitor at work.

And there’s an establishment in Kazakhstan, where Yakunin, one of their gifted psychics, has detected her presence in Czechoslovakia. As he gets to know her, his loyalties become strained: does he hunt her or save her?

When Tana’s captured in a secret Soviet complex, London sends in Keith Tyson in a desperate attempt to get her out - or to silence her - before she breaks under interrogation.

Here are some reviews:

This is an exciting and well-constructed espionage thriller. I do not usually like this genre (I prefer horror stories) but I thought that this was an intelligent and nicely-paced story. Morton pays great attention to detail and he has created a memorable heroine with Tana Standish - a tough, efficient super-spy with psychic powers who makes James Bond and Harry Palmer look like Austin Powers…

The unusual twist is that as well as being lethal in armed and unarmed combat, Tana also possesses a psychic sixth-sense and telepathic abilities which certainly come in handy at times as the action moves towards a thrilling climax. There is plenty of (literally) thought-provoking material thrown in along the way making this an extremely entertaining read. Even if you do not normally like spy thrillers, this is well worth checking out.

– Jeremy W Newbould, (Top 500 reviewer, Amazon)

Welcome back to the Cold War. For those of you who remember with affection those atmospheric spy stories set in Eastern Europe, men and women with unpronounceable names, then this will surely be a welcome return for you all. Snatches of John le Carré, Len Deighton and Adam Hall are in effect sewn into the secret weave that runs like a latent thread through the pages of Nik Morton's spy adventure set in Eastern Europe.

Morton’s heroine, Tana is made of stern stuff and possesses a savant like ability to move out of her consciousness and into an ethereal plane. Here she fights against the chilling torture methods used by her tormentor, Kasayiev to probe her mind and get her to break under his perverted methods.

Because Tana has learned of the top secret subterranean Sumava complex, British Intelligence have to get Tana out and save her from certain death. In a race against time, Morton puts together a fast moving narrative as Keith Tyson battles to save his colleague, Tana.
– Michael Parker, author of The Boy from Berlin

This book reminded me of Le Carré - carefully crafted and supremely well researched. As well as creating memorable characters (Tana Standish will stay with me for a long time), Nik Morton captures the essence of Prague and the Czech soul, educates us into the world of Eastern Bloc politics, and tells an intricate tale of espionage. As if this weren’t enough, he explores the fields of psychics and telepathy, adding intriguing depth to his story.

Far more than a ‘spy thriller’, this book will astound both lovers of that genre and those looking for a truly satisfying read.
– Maureen Moss, editor and travel writer

Reading this excellent novel is a bit like an extreme sport. The pages fly by at a pace, hindered only slightly by the mental anguish of dealing with some unpronounceable Czech and Soviet names. But that was certainly not enough to prevent me becoming engrossed in this relentless flow of exciting action and carefully researched information which lasts right up to the climactic denouement—in itself, both satisfying and rewarding—because Nik Morton’s writing is very smooth and totally believable. All-in-all, this book gave me that feeling of “being there myself”, rubbing shoulders with his characters, and for quite a while after finishing it, I found myself thinking about them and all they had been through.

– William Daysh, author of Over by Christmas

In his fast-paced novel he surpasses Ian Fleming and paints a vivid picture of the dangerous life of the attractive psychic spy Tana Standish.

– Joy Lennick, author of Hurricane Halsey

Interestingly, Morton sells it as a true story passed to him by an agent and published as fiction, a literary ploy often used by master thriller writer Jack Higgins. Let’s just say that it works better than Higgins.

– Danny Collins, author of The Bloodiest Battles

As a book reviewer, I’ve been weaned on highly trained agents with all kinds of fancy offensive gear at their fingertips; masters of such disciplines as kung fu and jiu-jitsu, constantly hopped in and out of bed. Nik Morton goes one better with his mind-blowing characters. Through the medium of his super spy, Tana Standish – an Amazon of Polish/English extraction – he adds more than a touch of paprika to the machinations of the cloak and dagger world and weaves a really cleverly contrived plot – explosive from start to finish. Get this – Tana is not just a superwoman but a psychic too. Yet confusing the issue, the opposition are also training psychic agents, one of whom is able to influence Tana’s movements yet appears to be sympatico… (plot revelations omitted)… This tale is a lively, well written espionage adventure with plenty of twists.

– Malcolm Smith, The New Coastal Press

[The above are a sample of reviews of the book previously published as The Prague Manuscript, which is OUT OF PRINT].

Monday, 17 November 2014

Secret file-03 – Major Vassily Kasayiev, KGB

Date of birth – unknown; believed to be in 1918. Unmarried. At the time of The Prague Papers, in 1975, he appeared to be in his mid- to late-fifties.

Major, KGB. Overweight. Has a predilection for hashish cigarettes, which accounted for his discoloured teeth. Small, cold dark eyes pierce subordinates. Approaching retirement.

***

Thick pillows flounced on either side of him, Kasayiev sat up in bed and jabbed at the dozen or so pickles surrounding the Russian crabmeat and mayonnaise. ‘Damned pickles with everything!’ He swore, eyes heavy with lack of sleep.

Though he was still verging on irritability, the breakfast went down well, washed all the way with jet-black Turkish coffee. His teeth crunched the tiny cool pickles. He ate them only because the doctor said they helped break down body fats. He preferred Spanish onions, though. He belched and realised that he’d come a long way since those far-off days in Spain.

He remembered the day well, 16th September, 1936. As a recruit of six months’ experience, he had arrived in Spain at the age of sixteen together with fifty other pilots. To fight for the Republicans.

A lump still rose in his throat as he recalled first seeing his own I-15 Ilyushin standing on the airfield: the Spanish dubbed the I-15s Chato, snub-nose – yet he had thought it the most beautiful creation on earth – and all his!

His fellow-pilots had difficulty curbing his youthful exuberance. He dearly wanted to slaughter the Nationalists, to blast their Fiats, Heinkels and Junkers.

But training-classes demanded his time and attention. Recognition classes; strategy; and, laughably, he was expected to teach Spaniards to fly as well. Him, with only a hundred hours under his belt.

Then came his first kill. His heartbeat quickened at the memory. He had been dawdling negligently when he spotted a squadron of nine Fiats above him, appearing from behind a bank of cloud. The dryness of mouth and rapid pulse-rate came back to him as if the events had only happened yesterday. He had slammed the throttle wide open and climbed to meet the enemy, the exhilaration of surprise attack quashing any fears he harboured. He didn’t have time to be afraid.

Yanking the stick hard over, he kicked on the rudder-bar and was abruptly swinging in behind the formation as it slid past. A Fiat drifted into his sights and he fired, wide eyes peering with a mesmerised glaze through his goggles as the bullets flashed and sparkled on the enemy’s wings. Then tracer lanced past his cockpit and he knew fear; pure survival-instinct hauled back on the stick, and the craft frantically bounced higher. He glanced back. The Fiat was nosing earthwards, blazing furiously, and his heart soared. He never did recall landing.

That kill had been his introduction to the slaughter of battle. It seemed so clinical, far removed from the hand-to-hand fighting on the ground.

By the time the Italians attacked Madrid in March 1937 he was a hardened veteran of the skies. Together with his compatriots, he systematically cut the Italians to ribbons, strafing endlessly as the poorly led rabble became bogged down in the mud left by recent rain. It was sickening to begin with, but after the ninth or tenth run in, it became automatic, merely capricious target practice. The Barcelona highway was littered with burning transport and hundreds of corpses, creating their own bottleneck, enabling the Chatos to deliver their death-blows at will. Carnage was too mild a description of their efforts.

Blood-lust figured in Kasayiev’s life from that moment. He reveled in inflicting pain on his women in Madrid and particularly relished the death of an enemy especially if he could see the poor pilot futilely beating off the flames as his plane plummeted.

Much of the credit for the Italians’ rout was attributed to Commander Berzin, head of the Intelligence Directorate of the Soviet General Staff and codenamed ‘Goriev’ whilst in Spain. Berzin became Kasayiev’s hero.

So late in 1937 he was shattered when he learned that Berzin had been recalled to Moscow under a cloud. Berzin faced charges of being a Trotskyite; the tribunal found him guilty and he was shot, as were so many high-ranking officers in Stalin’s senseless purges.

With the memory of Berzin’s execution constantly in his mind, Kasayiev determined to keep his nose clean and actually distinguished himself. Throughout the years of 1937-38 the great purges kept most officers in thrall; many were grossly unhappy at the prospect when the Soviet hierarchy decided to recall them on realizing that the Republicans’ cause was lost.

But Kasayiev was not among those singled-out for purging. Instead, he found himself halfway around the world at Langchow, embroiled in the Soviet-Japanese conflict, flying his I-15 amidst the twisting mêlée of a hundred aircraft. He acquitted himself in countless sporadic duels with the Mitsubishi ASMs. But he soon discovered that his beloved I-15 was quite inferior to the Japs’ Nakajima Ki27s: he was shot down but survived with only minor wounds.

It was while recuperating that he allied himself with a sallow character in the Intelligence Section, Lieutenant-Colonel Lobanov.

He then remembered his hero, Berzin, and guessed correctly where the real power lay. Not in a soldier’s hands, nor an airman’s, nor a sailor’s. But in the Secret Service.

On his return to active duty he repeatedly requested a transfer to Intelligence and finally, in 1942, he was successful and joined the NKVD in time to fight the Nazi menace.

He had committed some vile things in his time, mainly to satisfy his gross appetite for blood. But nothing he had perpetrated could match the vileness of those Nazi pigs.

Kasayiev’s fingers trembled at the memory of the concentration camps he had personally seen. And he lit a hashish cigarette to calm himself.

As the hemp coursed through him and did its work, he cursed his susceptibility.

Every time he reminisced on his career, he came round to his numerous encounters with the Gestapo. He should know better by now.

Whenever he came across an ex-SS man – usually working in another Security Department, such as the First Chief Directorate or Department V – he couldn’t refrain from revealing his naked hatred.

***

On November 26, The Prague Papers are released, published by Crooked Cat. It is based on a manuscript handed to me by an MI6 agent, Alan Swann. It needed some knocking into shape, as it had been a collaborative effort by a select group of agents, all intent on telling the story of Tana Standish, psychic spy, whose career spanned 1965 to 1988. They asked that her story be told as fiction.

As a result, the novel The Prague Papers is the first adventure to feature Tana Standish and is mainly set in Czechoslovakia in 1975.

Certain information was divulged in order for me to write the book; yet some has been concealed to date. This is the third secret file to be released ahead of the book. Others will follow.

Tuesday, 11 November 2014

Secret file – 02 - Professor Dmitri Bublyk

He was born on 17 October 1919. His father was taken away when he was fourteen, in 1933. He was inducted into the army and during the Second World War, a shell-casing exploded close to him and on recovering he discovered his psychic ability. He was in the Leningrad siege in January 1944.

At the time of the Prague Papers mission (1975), he was resident in the Kirlian Institute, Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, and ran a special group of psychics.

Tall, powerfully built and big-boned, he was the antithesis of the common image of a scientist. He was a manipulative man, without compassion.

He possessed a sallow complexion, a sickly yellow; he blamed it on not getting the right food, even with all his privileges. He had hooded eyes, coloured pale, yellowish brown and flaring nostrils and a long nose. His hair was the shade and consistency of straw and always untidy.

***

In the Kirlian Institute of Alma-Ata, the capital of Kazakhstan, Professor Bublyk paced the control room. Through the glass wall he could observe an adjoining room occupied by six men and four women, all of them sitting at desks. He smiled on them, his best students: The Group. They were all wearing headsets connected to an array of large cumbersome computers and clinical monitors. The men wore drab uniform gray coveralls while the women were dressed in clay-brown skirts and shirts.

Deep crease-lines in his forehead betrayed his worry about next year’s appropriations.

It was annoying but every time they sent an inspection team, he had to recount the history of mind control. As if the idiots understood even a fraction of what he told them!

‘The history of mind control began with our experiments carried out by Pavlov in the Thirties to modify behavior,’ he would say. ‘While the salivating dog experiments were the most well-known, they were merely the precursor.’

Indeed. The precursor to more sinister work. Lenin made Pavlov a ‘guest’ at the Kremlin for about three months until the scientist had completed a special report, relating his research to human beings rather than dogs. Pavlov’s manuscript never left the Kremlin and it laid the groundwork for NKVD brainwashing techniques such as sleep deprivation, systematic beatings and verbal indoctrination. Brain damage, Pavlovian conditioning, hypnosis, sensory stimulation, ‘black psychiatry’ and ‘mind cleansing’ were all employed to subvert the will of perceived enemies of the state.

And as Bublyk was at pains to point out, ‘the ultimate brainwashing tool is the actual invasion of another person’s mind with yours.’ That was the motherland’s version of the Holy Grail.

In the Fifties, when Bublyk first entered para-psychological research, funds were scarce, as most of the work was done without the Stalinists being aware of it. Thankfully for him, the Stalinist taboo was lifted in the early Sixties, and he finally saw funding at last become plentiful because both the KGB and the GRU leaders hoped to harness psychic energy as another weapon in their arsenal.

Bublyk explained with justified pride, ‘It was Russian sleep research that detected the theta state of consciousness, which is found in dreaming sleep.’ This seemed to be somehow linked to psychic awareness. If this theta state could be augmented, they would have psychic spies – or even mind-assassins. To many of his listeners it seemed far-fetched, but the potential from success, no matter how remote, meant that rubles were diverted to this new branch of research.

The Sixties were a golden time for him and those years promised much, with experiments in submarines and in space, but deliverables were scarce. It was an inexact science, prey to mood, to environment and doubtless planetary influences for all Bublyk knew.

Now, halfway through this new decade, all the pressures were building up and cracks were appearing in the structure of the State. Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB, was asking awkward questions. He wanted results to combat the Americans. Even members of the Politburo were becoming dissatisfied, though not within the hearing of Brezhnev and his informers.

The party tricks with cards were long gone. Psychical research had come a long way, Bublyk mused, eyeing in particular Karel Yakunin, their star psychic. Yakunin’s good looks and dark wavy hair transcended the drabness of his regulation clothing.

Bublyk smiled, recalling only last night when his mind roamed the dormitories and found Yakunin bedding little Raisa, the flaxen-haired Estonian psychic now sitting at the back of the room. Their coupling was against Bublyk’s regulations, as he believed sexual activity drained the psychic forces – a credo shared by oriental mystics. Yet he had not reported or disciplined them as he had to admit to quite enjoying being a voyeur.

Now, The Group was capable of distance viewing, of projecting thoughts into minds in other lands or of detecting other people’s thoughts in enemy countries. It was arduous work. Some of them suffered rapid weight-loss and heart-strain due to the exertion. Last year, two adepts died. It was no accident that the theta state was so named after the eighth letter of the Greek alphabet, suggesting a sign of doom – thanatos, the ‘death’ sign on the ballots used in voting on a sentence of life or death in ancient Greece.

And, Bublyk reflected, they still had a lot to learn. The prospects were good, but the funding committee wanted solid repeatable results, quantifiable answers. Damned bean counters! If only the measuring apparatus was up to the task!

At that moment, a buzzer jerked Bublyk out of his reverie. The light was on over Yakunin’s name – he’d detected someone!

Bublyk quickly scanned today’s roster and noted Yakunin was covering Czechoslovakia.

***

On November 26, The Prague Papers are released. This book is published by Crooked Cat. It is based on a manuscript handed to me by an MI6 agent, Alan Swann. It needed some knocking into shape, as it had been a collaborative effort by a select group of agents, all intent on telling the story of Tana Standish, psychic spy, whose career spanned 1965 to 1988. They asked that her story be told as fiction.

As a result, the forthcoming novel The Prague Papers is the first adventure to feature Tana Standish and is mainly set in Czechoslovakia in 1975.

Certain information was divulged in order for me to write the book; yet some has been concealed to date. This is the second secret file to be released ahead of the book. Others will follow.