Confessor

Gus Keene, former colleague of Herbie Kruger in the British Secret Intelligence Service, is, like his old friend, retired. Yet he has barely had time to smell the roses (and to begin work on his long-planned memoirs) when his car explodes, killing him instantly, not ten minutes down the rural lane leading from his peaceful country cottage. Could his tragedy have been an innocent road accident? Or is there a darker, more sinister meaning? Since Gus Keene had spent a career as one of the SIS's most highly regarded inquisitors, or "confessors, " debriefing hundreds of defectors, suspected double-agents and other secret-keepers in the great game of espionage, nothing can be taken for granted about his untimely death. As Herbie, out of shape and out of form but steadily more curious, pulls himself together to delve into Keene's past and the black arts of the "Confessor, " he discovers a bizarre fact: a man who professionally pursued truth was privately obsessed with illusion. In disguise and under another name, Gus Keene was a well-known authority on magic. Soon the strands of Keene's double life combine to form a deadly connection among certain unsettling global conflicts: Northern Ireland, the Falklands, the war in the Gulf plus a string of terrorist acts. The magic of illusion and the menace of remorseless ideological violence converge to form a terrifying maze that began in Herbie Kruger's own past and leads to his extremely dangerous present.