The deadline was close and I knew now what London had sent me out here to do: define, infiltrate, and destroy. And I couldn't do it just by standing in the way of the programme Moscow was running. I'd have to get inside and blow it up from there.

Quiller is back, on another mission for London's top-secret Bureau. The setting is Warsaw, "a city whose winter is not only in the streets," and crucial East-West talks are imminent. As Control described it, the mission sounded innocuous enough: to break in a new young agent investigating a potential uprising by the anti-Soviet underground. But Quiller knows that, as always, there's more to his assignment. And he knows, too, that whatever the "more" is, it will come as a potentially fatal surprise.

Adam Hall's new novel is another classic espionage thriller, written with style, intelligence and imagination. The fast-moving plot involves an automobile chase across iced-glazed streets, a game of cat-and-mouse with an infamous defector, and becomes ultimately the portrait of a man callously thrown into the crossfire of the Cold War, with only his wits to protect him.