The King's Pawn

"I loved The King's Pawn - it's just so exciting to see a powerful female character like Sarah Black emerging. This is a fast-paced espionage thriller that feels fresh and exciting - and takes you to some shocking places. It will keep you up far too late!" - Holly Watt, journalist, crime writer and winner of the 2019 CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger.

Sarah Black is young, naïve, inexperienced, and the latest recruit into the world of international espionage. Thrown into a world where nothing is as it seems, and no one can be trusted, Sarah must learn the rules of the game quickly, just to survive.

Drawn to the enigmatic Michael, a suave but elusive MI6 agent, she falls into a world of adventure and intrigue.

When MI6 hear rumours of a potential attack on a new oil pipeline across the Caucasus, Sarah finds herself thrust into the middle of a web of deceit and intrigue.

Alone and without support in an unstable Eastern Europe, can Sarah foil the plot before it’s too late?

Can she draw on all her ingenuity and courage to survive in a world where everyone thinks they are a king but actually all are just pawns?

“If you’re looking for the next Le Carré, Ludlum or Silva, then she has arrived and her name is Lucy Hooft, the refreshingly new female spy author. Steel yourself for her spectacular and much anticipated British spy series set in Eastern Europe that catapults you into a world of 21st Century intrigue, deception, and a perilous slalom of twists and turns you—I’ll warn you now—might never recover from.”
- Richard Lyntton, author of North Korea Deception and The Deception Series.

For as long as she can remember, Lucy has always been in love with books - stories of adventure, of weird and wonderful places, and seeing the world through someone else's eyes. She always dreamed of writing, but there were other things to do first.After a career working for the British government in places such as Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, China and Sierra Leone, she then worked in Jordan for Her Majesty Queen Rania while spending much time bumping around the phenomenal Jordanian desert.After Jordan, she spent several years in a jungle camp in Gabon surrounded by elephants and humpback whales, which is where the Sarah Black books began - as a way to record all the best bits of people she had met and places she had been, with a plot to make them much more exciting. Lucy has always plausibly denied being a spy - but the books were written to show what that life might have been like.Lucy is now enjoying the freedom of living at the end of the world in Lüderitz, Namibia, crafting stories and making films about the adventure of growing giant kelp.She also wastes a considerable amount of time on Twitter @HooftLucy