The Agent Runner

November 7, 2016
In this hard-nosed thriller from Steel Dagger Award–winner Conway (A Loyal Spy), a British agent tries to redeem himself after a professional miscalculation. Set primarily in Pakistan, the plot focuses on MI6 handler Ed Malik’s supervision of a spy code-named Nightingale, now in his fourth year of infiltrating Pakistan’s ISI security service. Malik’s bosses, however, blame him for not knowing about the American mission to steal into Pakistan and kill Osama bin Laden. Called home and eventually dismissed, Malik takes a job in a freight office and falls in love with the owner’s daughter. Meanwhile, he’s plotting his return to MI6, and eventually the opportunity arises. He flies to Lahore for one final mission, this time to take out Pakistan’s legendary spymaster, Maj.-Gen. Javid Aslan Khan, known as the Hidden Hand. Conway, a former British army officer, excels at capturing the brutality and duplicity of the ways of espionage. Many of his scenes, particularly late in the story, are disturbingly realistic, with magnetism that plays out before your unblinking eyes.

November 15, 2016
A fictionalized account of events before and after the killing of Osama bin Laden, seen through the eyes of two men on opposite sides of the conflict.April, 2011. The title character, MI6 officer Ed Malik, has a tense meeting in Kabul with the British ambassador to Afghanistan, who, unlike Malik, favors force over diplomacy in international relations. Malik's job managing agents to gather intelligence is immensely challenging. Lately he's been trying out an agent code-named Nightingale, a pretentious and unpredictable man embedded in Pakistan, who wants permission to befriend Noman Butt, a terrorist officer the reader learns is working directly with the hidden bin Laden. Virtually born into the conflict, Noman's path was set when his mother's death from oppressive heat consigned him to an orphanage at the tender age of 4. He's dismayed by American attacks nearing bin Laden's location. Though there seems no other explanation, Noman is slow to believe that his friend Tariq is the traitor Malik knows as Nightingale. Ed realizes that Nightingale is trapped with little possibility of escape and will probably be sacrificed for the mission. While he's on the phone with the terrified young man, there's an ominous gunshot and an unidentified man takes hold of the receiver at the other end. Returning to Britain, Ed is suspended and resolves to make a bold move in order to regain his confidence and reputation, setting himself up against Noman. Conway (Rock Creek Park, 2012, etc.) finds an offbeat way to recast an iconic piece of recent history through the personal stories of a pair of vastly different characters.

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December 1, 2016
Conway's U.S. debut makes an energetic case for Pakistan being the craziest place in the Middle East, if not the world. Javid Aslam Khan, the brilliant head of the country's formidable ISI spy agency, dashes around the country making deals with fractious warlords and possibly abetting the development of a dirty bomb by a group in the tribal areas, even though he's on the payroll of Britain and the U.S. Khan's handpicked deputy and son-in-law, Noman Butt, was a Hindu orphan forced to convert to Islam whose lifelong rage and cunning, fueled by a salad of drugs, has him thinking about deposing, or disposing of, Khan. In Britain, Samantha Burns, the elfin head of MI6, cashiers agent runner Ed Malik, a mixed-race Muslim Brit, only to draw him back for a black op to get Khan that delivers him into the terrifying hands of Butt. Conway's lean and propulsive prose makes the moral murk of deceit and betrayal compelling, and his take on the historic price of British involvement in the Middle East rings true.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)