Night Heron

Name: Night Heron
Brand: Hachette Audio
Availability: InStock
Author: Adam Brookes
ISBN: 9781478953418

Author: Adam Brookes

Narrator: Jason Isaacs

Unabridged: 10 hr 42 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Redhook

Published: 05/27/2014

Categories: Fiction, Suspense & Thriller, Espionage, Action & Adventure, Political, Mystery & Detective, International Crime & Mystery

Synopsis

Set in China, and ripped from today's headlines, comes a pulse-pounding debut that reinvents the spy thriller for the 21st century.

A lone man, Peanut, escapes a labor camp in the dead of night, fleeing across the winter desert of north-west China.

Two decades earlier, he was a spy for the British; now Peanut must disappear on Beijing's surveillance-blanketed streets. Desperate and ruthless, he reaches out to his one-time MI6 paymasters via crusading journalist Philip Mangan, offering military secrets in return for extraction.

But the secrets prove more valuable than Peanut or Mangan could ever have known. . . and not only to the British.

About Adam Brookes

Adam Brookes was born in Canada and grew up in the United Kingdom. For many years he was a journalist for BBC News, working as a correspondent in Beijing, as well as in Indonesia and the United States. He lives in Takoma Park, Maryland.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Kelly

Selecting the 5-star "it's amazing" designation risks causing some grade inflation, but this book was amazing enough to overcome my decades-old bias against thrillers. I won Night Heron through a Goodreads giveaway and was impressed by how thought-provoking it was, especially in terms of how it depi......more

Goodreads review by Jim

Wow! I've never read anything by this author before, but I'm glad I corrected that. It's a fantastic spy thriller with very real people in a horrible situation. The way the players used each other was particularly horrifying & the end results were perfect. Even better, the computer stuff was well do......more

Goodreads review by Alex

Let's dispense with the political stuff first: this book offers a nuanced view of the "surveillance state" issue, demonstrating that it provides for good as well as for ill, and reminding us that it has much bigger offenders than the much-maligned western democracies. Espionage is a tool that can be......more

Goodreads review by Larry

There's a classic espionage story arc or two that trace back to Eric Ambler in this fine novel: how journalists get suborned by the intelligence establishment and how that establishment uses up its human assets to advance the careers of the symasters. Li Heshuang, abandoned in the past by his Britis......more

Quotes

"One of the best and most compulsively readable spy-fiction debuts in years."—Kirkus

"The pace is frenetic and Brookes does a wonderful job with both the high-tech world of cyber intelligence and survival on Beijing's gritty, smog-smothered streets. Highly recommended."—The Bookseller

Night Heron is a fascinating portrait of the dangerous complexities of spying in a restricted country, the competing agendas driving international intelligence, and China's startlingly varied social realities.A must-read for fans of espionage and smart global fiction in general.—Booklist (starred review)

"Night Heron is a wonderfully cinematic novel -- I felt myself visually transported into every scene, watching the action unfold -- that also immersed me in the sounds and smells and feel of China, all the while telling a rich, complex espionage story. A remarkable accomplishment."—Chris Pavone, author of international bestseller The Expats

"Fans of the international espionage genre will inhale this fast tale in a few suspenseful breaths. Brookes uses multiple narrators -- the spy, the engineer, the journalist, the agent, the boss -- whose conflicting alliances tell the real story."—Library Journal

"Brookes, a correspondent for BBC News in Washington, DC, who was formerly based in China, takes readers deep inside the culture and daily routines of that country in his outstanding fiction debut... Good chase scenes and tense dialogue, coupled with a convincing picture of what actually happens in the corridors of power, make Brookes a thriller writer to watch."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)