Peter Tonkin

Peter Tonkin's first novel, KILLER, was published in 1978. His work has included the acclaimed "Mariner" series - 12 novels that have been critically compared with the best of Alastair MacLean, Desmond Bagley and Hammond Innes.

More recently he has been working on a series of detective thrillers with an Elizabethan background. This series, "The Master of Defense", has been characterised as 'James Bond meets Sherlock Holmes meets William Shakespeare'. Each story is a classic 'whodunit' with all the clues presented to the reader exactly as they are presented to the hero, Tom Musgrave. The Kirkus Review described them as having 'Elizabethan detail, rousing action sequences, sound detection...everything a fan of historical mysteries could hope for."

Benin Light shines out in the pre-dawn darkness, as Richard Mariner, captain and marine adventurer, approaches aboard the supertanker Prometheus V. The lighthouse is the marker for the bay that will lead to Granville Harbour, wild and inaccessible on the western coast of Africa. After an unfriendly early-morning exchange with the harbour master, Richard decides it is time to get ashore quickly to sort it out. His wife, Robin, organizes one of the hotel's helicopters to pick him up from the supertanker, but above the harbour bullets strike the side of the helicopter. It is a place of poverty, greed and corruption, but the couple are still shocked to see Sergeant Voroshilov, a Russian Militia man who left Robin lucky to be alive after their last encounter. And when armed guards arrive at the hotel to arrest Richard, trouble really begins.