A Lethal Involvement

Peter Ashton thinks that he has finished with the twilight world of the SIS. But the SIS has not forgotten Ashton.
Captain Simon Oakham of the Royal Army Pay Corps has gone AWOL, immediately after a suspicious interview with the security service. The SIS turns to Ashton to conduct the perfectly routine manhunt.
But Ashton soon becomes entangled in an investigation that leads him to a Chechnyan hit team as it careens lethally through the south of England via two dead Army officers to a long-suppressed murder in Hong Kong.
The key to it all is a guilt-ridden, embittered woman whose unsuspecting knowledge of a lethal involvement makes her especially vulnerable.
Ashton's search for her could prove equally lethal.

Egleton's espionage thrillers are like single-malt whiskey: smooth, smoky and rich, but eventually befuddling if you don't keep your wits about you. This one begins with a story about a possible murder in Germany in 1975. In the present, Peter Ashton (Death Throes, etc.) is brought back as a contract employee for British Intelligence and soon uncovers a lurid murder with gay overtones. In almost no time, he's picking his way through various British police and civil servants, the CIA, Hong Kong gangsters and even Chechen hit men and gun-runners. The body count is high. The plot spins from London to Hong Kong?lovely local color, there?to Langley and California. Chief among the novel's joys is Ashton's working through the cold, if often funny, SIS office politics. As usual, Egleton's plot complications can stun a horse, or a careless reader, but their intricacy is delicious and well worth the risk.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Though finally separated from Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service, hard-to-handle agent Peter Ashton (Death Throes, 1995, etc.) is now recalled to duty by his erstwhile masters to investigate a seemingly simple case that soon turns complicated. When a British Army captain who was being vetted for a computer post with SIS goes missing, his would-be employer assigns Ashton to make discreet inquiries. Any hopes of a quiet probe are immediately dashed by the bizarre murder of a retired major known to have had a youthful homosexual fling at a Swiss ski resort with the AWOL officer. Following background checks on the presumptive principals, Ashton determines that the ultimate answers to his questions lie in Hong Kong, where the military men in question were stationed together during the Vietnam War. Once in the Crown Colony (a restive venue on the eve of its return to mainland China), the boat-rocking operative turns over one rock too many and is nearly gunned down in a Triad ambush that takes the life of an Aussie colleague. On the evidence of a crooked inquest that hushed up the suspicious death of a young American woman more than two decades earlier, however, Ashton discovers a CIA link that puts him on a twisty trail to the US. The body count ratchets up a half dozen more notches before the relentless sleuth can get to the bottom of a long-lived plot hatched by an unreconstructed cold warrior who, despite the collapse of the Socialist Bloc, remains hell-bent on equipping any breakaway regime that will take arms against the hated Russians. Another of Egleton's complex but solid espionage procedurals. Here, the mysteries are revealed with edgy ambiance (courtesy of the professional paranoia induced by downsizing democracies) in much the same way as one peels away an onion's layers to reach the pearl at the center. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Peter Ashton, now retired from the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), is asked to look into the suspicious disappearance of an army captain who was being considered for top-secret clearance. His investigation leads to the 1969 death of an Asian American woman in Hong Kong and another death in Germany. Ashton, the consummate detective, is following the scant information he possesses when the captain's wife is brutally gunned down by two Chechnyan gangsters. From here the plot explodes into action, and everywhere Ashton goes danger is present. Egleton (Death Throes, St. Martin's, 1995) makes something that at first appears simple into a complex, convoluted thriller leaving the reader breathless and waiting for the next Ashton novel. For all libraries, especially ones with followers of British intrigue.
-?Jo Ann Vicarel, Cleveland Heights-University Heights P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Is there espionage after the cold war? Just ask Peter Ashton, "retired" from British intelligence, who's been enlisted by his old boss, Victor Hazelwood, to look into the disappearance of a British army officer who had just applied for high-level security clearance. Ashton starts tugging at threads and finds a fearsomely convoluted plot that involves illegal arms sales, foreign nationals, illicit sex, murder for hire, and a deadly game of double cross. Before he's through unraveling the case, Ashton has traveled through England, crossed the ocean, offended the American "cousins" at Langley, encountered an unscrupulous intelligence agent who nearly proves to be his undoing, and survived kidnapping and a near-fatal car crash--all in a day's work for the heroic, low-key Ashton. Egleton's masterly storytelling and trademark rat-a-tat style, combined with authentic detail, an inventive plot, and superb pacing, add up to yet another outstanding thriller. Emily Melton