Washington Shadow (Peter Cotton) - Softcover

Monroe, Aly

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0719520932 ISBN 13: 9780719520938

Publisher: John Murray, 2010

Synopsis

Set in 1945, one year after The Maze of Cadiz, the second Peter Cotton book finds the agent in segregated D.C. It is September 1945. Bankrupt and desperate, Britain sends John Maynard Keynes to boom town Washington, D.C. to beg for a loan. Under cover of the backup team, agent Peter Cotton is sent to investigate the break-up of America’s wartime intelligence agency. Cotton finds himself caught up in a world of shadows involving an extraordinarily attractive girl from the U.S. State Department; a Soviet ex-tank commander claiming to be his opposite number; a contrarian African academic; an ambitious, quick-tempered boss from the world of misinformation; and an Anglo-American conspiracy that will change the world of postwar intelligence for ever.

About this title

About the Author:

Aly Monroe is the author of The Maze of Cadiz, which was the first Peter Cotton novel, a series that begins during World War II and follows the process of decolonization and the aftermath of Empire. 

From Booklist:

The postwar period has given us some of our most atmospheric espionage fiction, from John le Carré to Robert Littell and Joseph Kanon. Monroe’s take on the period, while lacking the complex moral and emotional texture typical of those authors, captures the mood of the era—a gin-soaked mix of relief, ennui, and uncertainty—with unfailing accuracy. Peter Cotton, recently released from the British army at the end of the war, signs on with the intelligence service and is sent to Washington, D.C., with a team of economists, including John Maynard Keynes, whose mission is to beg relief money from the U.S. Cotton’s real assignment, however, is to figure out what will take the place of the OSS, America’s recently disbanded wartime intelligence office. Quickly, the stakes are raised, as Cotton sniffs out the beginnings of an Anglo-American conspiracy and finds himself falling in love with a woman from the State Department. The plot unwinds in fairly typical fashion, but Monroe does a nice job with the doomed Cold War romance, evoking Sebastian Faulks’ similar On Green Dolphin Street (2002). --Bill Ott

About this edition

• Publisher: John Murray
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0719520932
• ISBN 13: 9780719520938
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336