"Free Agent"

This espionage novel by Jeremy Duns is the first in a trilogy about Paul Dark and, although it is fiction, it is based in part on actual events surrounding the Nigerian civil war. It alternates between Dark's experiences as a young MI6 recruit in 1945 (when he worked with his father and one of his father's colleagues on a top secret mission to unofficially execute Nazi war criminals) and 1969 when Dark feels compelled to travel to Nigeria to learn what a defecting KGB officer may know about his father (who has been missing since 1945) and Anna, a young Russian nurse that Paul had an affair with in 1945 who was later murdered that same year. This novel is full of twists and turns typical of British spy novels -- like authors LeCarre and Forsyth. I was surprised to learn that the author, a former journalist, lives in Sweden and was raised mostly in Africa and Asia. It was a book that I didn't want to put down so read it in a couple of evenings and highly recommend it if you're a fan of espionage novels.

pazt