Michael Hartland was a complete unknown to me until I downloaded Down Among the Dead Men from Audiobooksforfree.com. This novel is an excellent Le Carré type spy novel set during the Carter administration and explains the Chinese invasion/incursion into Vietnam in the late seventies. To say too much more would give away the surprise ending.
David Nairn is Ben Foo’s British controller. Foo is a Chinese British agent based in Hong Kong. One of his agents has been killed while trying to reveal some important information related to Lin, a mysterious man who has ostensible connections with the Taipei regime. The British send Ruth, an inexperienced agent to Hong Kong to shadow Lin and soon a bizarre connection is revealed between Anna Levshina, a Russian KGB agent named Golovkin, a secretive KGB major general Kirov and Lin. They all appeared together in a photo taken in Vietnam during the fifties in the war against the French. Nairn manipulates Ruth and the other players in an attempt to discover a connection that is ultimately revealed to be a plot to obtain atomic weapons by the Taiwanese government. But as in all good spy novels, nothing is ever what it appears to be.
