The Waiting Time - 1998

Summary
On a winter's night at the height of the Cold War, in a small town on the Baltic coast of East Germany, a young man is dragged from the sea and killed by the regime's secret police. The witnesses are terrorised into silence. But a British woman is present and hears the shot which ended her lover's life.

A decade later, times have changed; the Wall dividing two great ideologies has crumbled, and old enemies have become new friends. An ex-captain in the Stasi's counter-espionage section, Dieter Krause is a f�ted guest at the headquarters of British military intelligence. He is a prized asset, able to give the detailed profile of a rising star in the Russian Ministry of Defence. He is confident that the skeletons in his past are hidden until...

Corporal Tracy Barnes, a clerk, attacks him in the officers' mess. For her, the waiting time is over. She was there at the scene of the young man's murder ten years before. She knows Krause is responsible. But can she prove it - she needs the witnesses to talk. To make them do so, she must follow Krause to Germany, determined to see a long-delayed victory for justice. But in a new country still at war with itself, defeat may just mean a place on the mortuary slab.

Extract
Shrieked a woman's cry for retribution, "Bloody killed him, you bastard!"
Blood was on her hands, blood in her nails, and the German screamed and was defenceless. Her thumb and forefinger stabbed at his closed eyes. Howled, the triumph of revenge, "How'd you like it? Bloody bastard murderer! What's it like?"

Reviews
"One of the best plotters in the business" TIME OUT

"One of Britain's most foremost pacy thriller writers" SUNDAY EXPRESS

Customer Review
"From the scene setting, right to the conclusion, I was hooked - couldn't put the book down."

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