Terence Strong spent his childhood in post-war south London, playing in the blitzed bomb-sites and running the gauntlet of the brown-uniformed keepers in Battersea Park. Inspired by Biggles, Buchan, Bulldog Drummond, Raffles, Hemingway and Ian Fleming, his heart became set on becoming a foreign correspondent and thriller writer. He completed his first full-length novel at sixteen but decided it wasn’t good enough and settled down to regular employment.

He worked as an advertising copywriter before winning the job of assistant editor on a trade newspaper, becoming editor eighteen months later at the age of twenty. His second novel met the same fate as the first but, after seven years of self employment ranging from freelance journalism and photography to advertising and public relations, he took up modern war gaming as a hobby and studied all aspects of warfare which stood him in good stead when he wrote his third novel, WHISPER WHO DARES, which was published in 1982 and is now in its 18th impression. Since then he has written a further twelve bestselling thrillers and the contacts he has made police and customs specialists, hostage negotiators, bodyguards, private investigators, professional assassins and all arms of the military have contributed to the extraordinary authenticity of his work.

Former British intelligence operative Phil Mason has embarked on a new career as a struggling private investigator. He's grateful for the offer of work from his former M15 liaison officer, Joe Lassiter, who requests his assistance in the hunt for members of al-Qaeda cells in the UK. M15 has a shortlist of 'low level' suspects who need to be investigated and eliminated from enquiries. Teaming up with his former associate, Jasmina (Jazz) Alagic, Mason sets out to track down Lassiter's suspects. At first, he finds the surveillance work mind-numbingly dull - until one of the subjects, a man known as Khan, starts to behave extremely suspiciously. Breaking into Khan's home, Mason and Jazz discover him dead, his throat slit. An encrypted email on the dead man's laptop reveals an enigmatic reference to an assassination attempt to be made on the US president during his forthcoming official visit. Heading a small team in the hunt for Khan's killer and the would-be assassins, the terrible truth dawns on Mason: there must be a traitor within the UK security apparatus. The tension ratchets up as the date of the President's visit fast approaches and the identity of the would-be assassin is revealed: a shocking revelation with dire consequences. Mason must hastily re-learn his old counter-sniper skills if the President's life is to be saved.