“A terrific thriller” from the winner of the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award for The Loyal Spy (Richard North Patterson, #1 New York Times–bestselling author).
British by birth, foreign by descent, and agnostic by conviction, Edward Henry Malik is an MI6 handler. For four years, he has been running an agent codenamed Nightingale inside Pakistan’s notorious ISI, keeping watch on its links to Al Qaeda and the Taliban and its machinations in neighboring Afghanistan, but mostly monitoring for threats to the British homeland. Then, in the aftermath of Osama bin Laden’s killing, Nightingale is exposed and Ed’s world falls apart.
Dismissed from MI6 and with his reputation in tatters, Ed returns to his roots in the immigrant enclave of Whitechapel in London’s East End. He takes a job at a freight forwarding office and unexpectedly falls in love with the proprietor’s daughter. It seems as if he has finally found respite from his demons. But you can’t escape your past. Ed knows too much, and he has come to the attention of a legendary Pakistani spymaster known as the Hidden Hand, while rumors swirl of a one-legged mullah and a shadowy militia with the means to detonate a dirty bomb.
“[A] hard-nosed thriller . . . Conway, a former British army officer, excels at capturing the brutality and duplicity of the ways of espionage.” —Publishers Weekly
“Conway is a master of taut, evocative prose, delivering blanching terror at a relentless pace. The Agent Runner is a dazzling tale of the wrenching human toll wrought by clandestine geopolitics.” —Eliot Pattison, Edgar Award–winning author of the Inspector Shan Tao Yun series
