From “one of the best authors of espionage fiction,” (Wall Street Journal), a book of swapped identities, and money to be made amid the rubble of World War II From an author whose books have been described as “one of the great pleasures of modern spy fiction” by Slow Horses author Mick Herron and compared to the works of Alan Furst, Phillip Kerr, and Joseph Kanon, in Smoke and Embers John Lawton turns to the murky days, weeks and years following the end of World War II in Germany, Britain, and beyond. Smoke and Embers is the ninth installment of the beloved Inspector Troy series, and opens in 1950, when a file lands on Scotland Yard Chief Inspector Troy’s desk, indicating that his boss has been conducting an affair with the known mistress of West London’s infamous runner of rackets, Otto Ohnherz. Ohnherz has mostly preoccupied himself with taking dubious care of the Jewish refugees arriving in Europe—finding them jobs and skimming their wages—but the line-item that gives Troy pause is the mysterious origins of Ohnherz’s second-in-command, Jay Fabian, who claims to have survived the concentration camps. Smoke and Embers is a highly surprising and intricately woven novel of the opportunity of reinvention after World War II, where identities swap, and smoke covers all tracks. With a twisting plotline, crackling dialogue, characteristic humor, and the return of beloved characters, Smoke and Embers is an exciting new addition to John Lawton’s masterful canon.
Author
John Lawton is a producer/director in television who has spent much of his time interpreting the USA to the English, and occasionally vice versa. He has worked with Gore Vidal, Neil Simon, Scott Turow, Noam Chomsky, Fay Weldon, Harold Pinter and Kathy Acker. He thinks he may well be the only TV director ever to be named in a Parliamentary Bill in the British House of Lords as an offender against taste and balance. He has also been denounced from the pulpit in Mississippi as a Communist,’ but thinks that less remarkable.
He spent most of the 90s in New York – among other things attending the writers’ sessions at The Actors’ Studio under Norman Mailer – and has visited or worked in more than half the 50 states. Since 2000 he has lived in the high, wet hills ofDerbyshire England, with frequent excursions into the high, dry hills of Arizona and Italy.
He is the author of 1963, a social and political history of the Kennedy-Macmillan years, six thrillers in the Troy series and a stand-alone novel, Sweet Sunday.
In 1995 the first Troy novel, Black Out, won the WH Smith Fresh Talent Award. In 2006 Columbia Pictures bought the fourth Troy novel Riptide. In 2007 A Little White Death was a New York Times notable.
In 2008 he was one of only half a dozen living English writers to be named in the London Daily Telegraph‘s 50 Crime Writers to Read before You Die.’ He has also edited the poetry of DH Lawrence and the stories of Joseph Conrad. He is devoted to the work of Franz Schubert, Cormac McCarthy, Art Tatum and Barbara Gowdy. (source: http://www.johnlawtonbooks.com)
He was born in 1949 in England.
