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Summary
Summary
Set in China, and ripped from today's headlines, comes a pulse-pounding debut that reinvents the spy thriller for the 21st century.
A lone man, Peanut, escapes a labor camp in the dead of night, fleeing across the winter desert of north-west China.
Two decades earlier, he was a spy for the British; now Peanut must disappear on Beijing's surveillance-blanketed streets. Desperate and ruthless, he reaches out to his one-time MI6 paymasters via crusading journalist Philip Mangan, offering military secrets in return for extraction.
But the secrets prove more valuable than Peanut or Mangan could ever have known. . . and not only to the British.
Author Notes
Adam Brookes was born in Canada, but grew up in the UK, in a village in Oxfordshire. In the 1980s, he studied Chinese at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and went on to become a journalist, working briefly in magazines before landing a post as a 'copytaster' at the BBC, a job now extinct. Adam became a radio producer at the BBC World Service, and then a foreign correspondent, based first in Indonesia, then China and the United States.
Along the way he has reported from some thirty countries including Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea and Mongolia, for BBC television and radio. 'Night Heron' is his first novel, and draws on his life in journalism, his years in China, and his efforts to understand something of what goes on in the world of intelligence. Night Heron is published in May 2014 and made Hatchette Hot Summer Titles List.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Brookes, a correspondent for BBC News in Washington, D.C., who was formerly based in China, takes readers deep inside the culture and daily routines of that country in his outstanding fiction debut. Li Huasheng (aka Peanut) has recently escaped from a remote Chinese labor camp after nearly 20 years of confinement for selling military secrets-a livelihood that he has now resumed with the help of one of his former conspirators who evaded capture. Meanwhile, Philip Mangan, a freelance British journalist recruited by his own country's spies to serve as a messenger for Peanut, wants to sell a software key that would give the West access to China's national security secrets, including information about troubles with its new nuclear missiles. Good chase scenes and tense dialogue, coupled with a convincing picture of what actually happens in the corridors of power, make Brookes a thriller writer to watch. Author tour. Agent: Catherine Clarke, Felicity Bryan Associates. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Against all odds, Prisoner 5995a former professor wrongly convicted of murderescapes a high security Chinese facility after 20 torturous years. Having concocted a plan to flee China and establish a new identity, he finds an unlikely ally in Mangan, a veteran British journalist based in Beijing.In his former life, the escapee was employed by British intelligence under the code name Peanut. After he finds a place to lay low and recover from the physical abuse he suffered at the prison camp, he tracks down a one-time fellow academic and spy who is now a well-off military researcher; he forces his old colleague to make copies of secret documents by threatening to expose his pastand by beating him to a pulp. When he hears about Mangan, a famous British reporter who lives in the area, Peanut passes the documents to him and asks that Mangan give them to his contacts in the British Embassy. Though he thrives on danger, the last thing Mangan wants is hot papers in his possession; he's already under close scrutiny by state security for a story he wrote on a cult after sneaking into the blockaded town it was occupying. After Mangan is talked into working for British intelligence, all manner of reversals, betrayals, arrests and killings have him and Peanut running for their lives. Brookes, a one-time China correspondent for the BBC, knows this turf exceedingly well and translates that knowledge into a novel that is as strikingly different as it is thrilling. In hinting at China's capabilities as a cyberenemy, the author may be giving us a clue about the subject of his next novel. One can't wait to read it.One of the best and most compulsively readable spy-fiction debuts in years. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In 1989, Li Huasheng (code name Peanut) was a promising Beijing engineer and the ringleader of a group of would-be defectors trading China's technology secrets to the UK. But their operation aborted when Peanut was imprisoned in a labor camp after impulsively attacking a soldier during the Tiananmen Square protests. Two decades later, Peanut returns to Beijing, desperate to renew the deal with UK intelligence that he's kept secret all these years. Peanut mistakes British journalist Philip Mangan for an undercover operative and approaches him with top-secret information he's strong-armed from a member of his former ring who has since risen in the party. Mangan manages to get the proof documents to the embassy, and he's immediately drafted into the world of espionage. But their secret world isn't as impenetrable as one would think, and the operation is threatened by a technology-hunting corporate intelligence team and leaks from American intelligence to the Chinese government. Brookes, a former BBC China correspondent, offers a tension-laden portal to modern China, contrasting Mangan's foreign perspective with Peanut's experiences to illustrate the impact of party politics on Chinese citizens. Night Heron is a fascinating portrait of the dangerous complexities of spying in a restricted country, the competing agendas driving international intelligence, and China's startlingly varied social realities. A must-read for fans of espionage and smart global fiction in general.--Tran, Christine Copyright 2014 Booklist
Library Journal Review
This first novel from Brookes, a BBC correspondent to China, relocates the traditional Cold War thriller to modern China. Jailed for protesting in Tiananmen Square, an -engineer-turned-spy known as Peanut resumes his undercover work after a dramatic prison break. Picking a British journalist as his new contact, Peanut resurrects what is left of his old network, but the game has changed. Agents have retired. Revolutionaries have vanished or taken comfortable jobs with the state. Agencies are hampered by contractors. Peanut discovers that even technology is working against him as he tries to arrange a deal that will get him out of China for good. VERDICT Fans of the international espionage genre will inhale this fast tale in a few suspenseful breaths. Brookes uses multiple narrators-the spy, the engineer, the journalist, the agent, the boss-whose conflicting alliances tell the real story. [See Prepub Alert, 1/19/14.]--Catherine Lantz, Univ. of Illinois at Chicago Lib. (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
