A Cold Wind From Moscow

Rory Clements

IN the bleak and bitter winter of early 1947, the Nazi killing machine has been vanquished but Britain and America face the machinations of another ruthless enemy... the emboldened Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.

With the dawn of the Cold War and a new and deadly kind of espionage on the horizon, the country is still on its knees after six years of conflict, and in London, MI5 is on the alert. But already, the British secret services have been penetrated by a Russian mole and they need an outsider to net him... a man they know they can trust implicitly.

In the eighth book of his acclaimed ‘what if’ historical novels series – which has included Corpus, Nucleus, Nemesis, Hitler’s Secret, A Prince and A Spy, The Man in the Bunker and The English Führer – former national newspaper journalist Rory Clements (pictured below) sweeps us back into the life of maverick Cambridge Professor Tom Wilde, his unconventional half-American, half-Irish history don who has braved death and danger to do his bit for victory and freedom.

Our hero Tom spent three years of the war as a spy with the Office of Strategic Services, America’s wartime intelligence agency, and is rapidly learning that there is no such thing as retirement from espionage in the uncertain peace of the post-war period. The Red Army’s ‘liberation’ of Eastern European countries has merely meant replacing one totalitarian enemy with another, and the stage is set for a new kind of warfare.

And in that freezing cold February – which saw icebergs off the coast of Norfolk and starved, frozen songbirds falling from trees – we find Tom despairing that his adopted country has ‘suffered catastrophe after disaster and calamity’ since the war ended 18 months ago.

Although his wife Lydia is away in London where she is training to be a doctor, and he feels stuck in a ‘hungry gloom,’ Tom is enjoying getting back into his academic life at Cambridge University and caring for their six-year-old son Johnny with the help of a live-in housekeeper. What he doesn’t yet know is that Stalin has a plan to destabilise what he sees as a weary, broken Britain and it involves sending his master of ‘Special Tasks’ to create extra chaos. But Stalin has a more important motive than mere disruption. He has a man on the inside who is in danger and must be protected at all costs, a Communist super-spy who has the secrets of the atomic bomb at his fingertips.

In London, Freya Bentall, a senior MI5 officer, no longer knows who to trust and is left with one option... to bring in an outsider whose loyalty is beyond question. That man is Tom Wilde and his task is to find the traitor in MI5. Bentall has three main suspects and Tom must get close to them all. That means delving deep into the criminal underworld, attaching himself to the cultural elite of the arts, and finding a way into the extreme reaches of British politics.

And as one of the coldest winters on record bites and violence erupts, Tom faces an uphill battle to protect his loved ones from merciless killers and he knows that one slip will spell disaster for the country... and his family.

Cool-hand academic Tom has to be one of historical fiction’s most charismatic adventurers… as intrepid as he is intellectually gifted, the unorthodox, US-born professor has acquired an engaging insouciance and British stiff upper lip stoicism which stand him in good stead as he encounters this new breed of enemy, one just as brutal as those he tracked down during the war years. So wrap up warm and buckle yourself in tightly because A Cold Wind From Moscow proves to be a thrilling Arctic ‘blast’ as we join Tom on a gripping, action-packed hunt for cold-blooded spies who will stop at nothing to plunge a broken, freezing Britain into a vortex of chaos and confusion.

And what a twisting, turning adventure it is as Clements immerses us in the harsh realities of strict food rationing, power cuts and other post-war challenges whilst delivering a scintillating spy mystery packed with dark secrets, hidden traitors, and a world that is moving apace towards nuclear weaponry. As always, Tom is the man in the middle, the reluctant but able spy who must use both his brains and his brawn to outsmart unknown but lethal enemies whilst trying desperately to protect his wife and son from their violent clutches.

Packed with drama, action and deadly subterfuge, and with a hero spy who always manages to keep his humanity in the face of others’ inhumanity, A Cold Wind From Moscow is fact and fiction, mystery and real history at its heart-thumping, page-turning best.
(Zaffre, hardback, £16.99)