The Bucharest Ledger #2 in the Marcus Vane Series

Three intelligence assets. One list. And the list came from inside.

In Cairo, an MI6 source disappears without a trace. In Damascus, six weeks earlier, another. In Ankara, three months before that, a third. Someone is working from a list — patiently, professionally, in the precise rhythm of a clock that only one person knows how to read.

Fourteen months after Elliot Marsh was led out of Vauxhall Cross in handcuffs, Marcus Vane has been trying to be a person rather than an operation. He runs in the mornings along the Tagus. He cooks. He sleeps. When the call comes at 3:47 in the morning, the only word on the screen is Cairo — and the only honest answer he can give is the one he has been giving for sixteen years.

What begins as the hunt for a single mole becomes the unravelling of something older and far larger. A private intelligence firm built quietly in Geneva across a decade. A CIA Deputy Director, a London consultant, a retired Oxfordshire civil servant in a cardigan with a cup of tea. A Gulf sovereign wealth fund six months from a commercial position worth hundreds of billions — willing to purchase the blindness of Western intelligence rather than negotiate it. And at the centre of an investigation Vane thought was closed eighteen months ago, a name he was not expecting to find.

From a café by the Nile in Zamalek to a relay buried inside a financial analytics firm on the Calea Victoriei, from a New York lawyer's table on Jane Street to a coffee house off Zurich's Talstrasse, from a Category C visiting room in HMP Whitemoor to a quiet bench in a Vauxhall garden — The Bucharest Ledger is a slow-burning, character-driven literary spy thriller in the great British tradition.

For readers of John le Carré, Mick Herron, Charles Cumming, and Robert Harris.

The second novel in the Marcus Vane series.

Some betrayals do not end. They restructure.