Two complete Novels.
The Cranes of Ibycus
A barrister cleared to argue the cases the public never sees uncovers a peace with no legal existence at all.
Jonathan Hale KC is a Special Advocate — one of the few barristers cleared to argue the secret cases that never reach an open court. It has made him trusted with the state’s evidence, and absent from his own life. Then ten cars burn on a single London night, a body in each, and the intelligence services that should have seen it coming do nothing. Hale is given standing to find out why, and sees at once what the spectacle is built to hide. The thread pulls him across Europe. 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 cell but an arrangement — a peace kept by means it can never avow, that files its work under illness, accident, coincidence. 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 remedy are not the same thing.
Pallamaglio
Trafalgar from its blind side — a story less of fleets and cannon than of the secrets a victory is built to bury.
1805. In the weeks before Trafalgar, the Reverend Alexander Scott — Nelson’s chaplain, confessor and closest 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 charge of Tom Twitchett, a foundling ship’s boy of twelve who cannot read a word and 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. A novel of the stories a nation tells, and the truer ones it buries to tell them, Pallamaglio gives us Trafalgar not from the quarterdeck but from the chaplain’s uneasy conscience: a victory whose real cost is counted in secrets, and a man who finds that keeping one is the last ministry left to him.