Two complete novels
The Cranes of Ibycus
A lawyer operating in confidential courts dealing with the intelligence services, uncovers a secret alliance with no legal existence at all.
Jonathan Hale KC is a Special Advocate — one of the few barristers cleared to argue secret cases involving the British intelligence services. His commitment and dedication, which make him trusted with the state’s evidence, are absent from his own personal life. Then ten burning cars, a corpse in each, lock down London. The intelligence services that should have seen it coming do nothing. Hale is instructed to find out why and discovers what the spectacle is built to hide. As his investigation weaves abroad through foreign intelligence services, the people who help him begin to die in accidents. The woman he comes to love moves in the shadow of the thing he hunts, and what he uncovers is not a terrorist cell but ruthless geopolitics.
The Cranes of Ibycus is a literary espionage novel about power that never raises its voice: what it costs to find the truth, and what it costs to learn that proof and justice are not the same thing.
Pallamaglio
Trafalgar, from those who were closest to Horatio Nelson and uncovered his secrets.
1805. In the weeks before Trafalgar, the Reverend Alexander Scott — Nelson’s chaplain, confessor and best friend, and a man quietly losing his faith — is handed a dishonourable order: to watch the admiral for signs that he is breaking. That same season he takes on Tom Twitchett, a ship’s boy of twelve, who cannot read or write but forgets nothing. As the fleet bears down on Trafalgar, Scott begins to trace where the child came from — and the answer runs closer to the heart of the man England is about to enshrine than he dares admit. It is a novel of the legends a nation tells, and the truer stories it buries to tell them.
Pallamaglio gives us Trafalgar not just from the quarterdeck of HMS Victory but also from those who love Nelson most - Frances Nelson, Emma Hamilton and Beth Andrews - and discover that the real price of victory is counted in keeping his secrets.