Unexploded Man - Softcover

Watkins, Leslie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0722189362 ISBN 13: 9780722189368

Publisher: Sphere, 1980

Synopsis

A political warfare thriller. The Russian Bear is stirring. After years of economic sanctions, isolation and rejection by the West, Russia is on the offensive. The Crimea is annexed and the West does nothing. Russian militias have occupied Eastern Ukraine while NATO, paralysed and impotent, looks on. Supported by Russia, a brutal proxy war continues in Syria driving millions of refugees towards Western Europe, destabilising country after country. The very fabric of the European Union faces collapse as soldiers string barbed wire across the continent. In Britain, the political classes are under attack. Dissidents who dare to speak out are murdered. Helped by unseen forces, unilateral disarmers are gaining power in Westminster. This is a different kind of war . . . a new cold war . . . where there is no front line, no rules of engagement and more treachery than ever imagined. "If elected I will never, under any circumstances, use a nuclear weapon," promises the leader of the British Opposition and the people love him for it. One person, journalist David Barnett, is a pawn, an unwilling victim of Russia's evil plan to win the peace . . . the key to what is going on. Barnett is The Unexploded Man. Here's what the reviewers said when The Unexploded Man was first published. Manchester Evening News : Grimly topical ... Watkins writes tightly and tautly and his background has an all too authentic ring to it. Daily Record : Good suspense stuff. Daily Mail : A dazzling piece of narrative writing. Liverpool Daily Post : A highly readable political thriller that is streets ahead of its competition by having that essential ingredient – style. Daily Telegraph : A chilling story of the cold war. Weekender (USA): The basic plot and the action scenes could be turned into a fine dramatic film, in the hands of the right producer. Publishers Weekly : Masterminding by the author keeps the pay-off a surprise right up to the end. Mineapolis Tribune : An imaginative fast-moving suspense tale that never loses its grip on the reader. Southern Evening Echo : Powerful writing here. The Unexploded Man a Political Warfare Thriller described as fiction but then again . . .

About this title

About the Author:

Welshman Leslie Watkins was acclaimed as a top Fleet Street journalist long before his first book was published in 1971. That was an attention-grabbing exploration of somnambulistic violence entitled The Sleepwalk Killers which, like some of his subsequent books was sparked by his newspaper assignments. Watkins's interest in the subject was aroused when he covered the 1961 murder trial of American airman Willis Boshears who had strangled his bed-mate, 20-year-old Jean Constable, at her home in Essex, UK. He was found not guilty because he had killed while fast asleep. His first novel The Killing of Idi Amin was inspired by his 1972 experiences in the crazed dictator's Uganda where he was covering a minor war. He was arrested at gunpoint and accused of being an anti-Amin spy, before being beaten up, imprisoned and threatened with execution. Background for his 1978 novel The Unexploded Man came from extensive interviews he had conducted for the Daily Mail with former inmates of Russia's notorious prison-hospitals - and with psychiatrists who had sought sanctuary in the West. He now lives quietly in New Zealand with his wife Kathleen, two dogs - Skipper and Suzi -and an elderly cat called Bundle.

About this edition

• Publisher: Sphere
• Publication date: 1980
• ISBN 10: 0722189362
• ISBN 13: 9780722189368
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256