Mission

1978. Iran is in ferment and the British Intelligence Service wants Tana Standish's assessment. It appears that CIA agents are painting too rosy a picture, perhaps because they're colluding with the state torturers... Allegiances and loyalties are strained as Tana's mission becomes deadly and personal. Old friends are snatched, tortured and killed by SAVAK, the Shah's secret police. She has to use all her skills as a secret agent and psychic to stay one step ahead of the oppressors and traitors. As the country stumbles towards the Islamic Revolution, the Shah's grip on power weakens. There's real concern for the MI6 listening post near the Afghan border. Only Tana Standish is available to investigate; yet it's possible she could be walking into a trap, as the deadly female Spetsnaz fighter Aksakov has been sent to abduct Tana. Meanwhile, in Kazakhstan, the sympathetic Yakunin, the psychic spy tracking Tana, is being side-lined by a killer psychic, capable of weakening Tana at the critical moment in combat with Aksakov. Can Yakunin save Tana without being discovered? In the troubled streets of Iran's ancient cities and amidst the frozen wastes on the Afghan border, Tana makes new friends and new enemies... 'There are not too many books that stay with you long after you finish reading them, not too many characters who are so alive it seems like you recently met them. And so it is with Tana Standish, the psychic spy in this page-turning thriller. We travel to Iran, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan and England and meet a variety of brilliantly portrayed characters - both chillingly cruel and highly talented, some of them torturers, others who control a team of remote viewers, others traditional British MI6 characters. The locations are so finely drawn we can almost reach and touch them, the atmosphere so vivid that we can shut our eyes and sense ourselves there.' - Maureen Moss, travel journalist