Patrick Worrall – författare

Brought to you by Penguin.It is the summer of 1961 and the brutal Cold War between East and West is becoming ever more perilous.Two young prodigies from either side of the Iron Curtain, Yulia and Michael, meet at a chess tournament in London. They don''t know it, but they are about to compete in the deadliest game ever played.Shadowing them is Greta, a ruthless resistance fighter who grew up the hard way in the forests of Lithuania, but who is now hunting down some of the most dangerous men in the world.Men who are also on the radar of Vassily, perhaps the Soviet Union''s greatest spymaster. A man of cunning and influence, Vassily was Yulia''s minder during her visit to the West, but even he could not foresee the consequences of her meeting Michael.When the world is accelerating towards an inevitable and catastrophic conflict, what can just four people do to prevent it?Epic in scope, The Partisan is a thrill ride like no other, taking you from the hallowed halls of Cambridge to the grimy depths of the Moscow underworld, from 1960s London to the Eastern Front in the Second World War.© Patrick Worrall 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

“What you've got to understand is that men like him are the aristocracy in here. The armed robbers and contract killers. They're a breed apart.”Darren Sinfield, the most notorious inmate at Lower Marston maximum-security prison, has gone over the wall and is thought to be holed up in nearby Avonford, a decaying town with a squalid underbelly.The intelligence officer tasked with hunting him down, Declan Rennard, was an Avonford man himself back in the day. But times have changed. He used to know where the bodies are buried. Now he’s in danger of becoming one of them.To catch a criminal, Dec is going to have to start thinking like one and that means entering his own dark history to engage in a twisted game of cat and mouse with a man who plays it better than anyone.But unearthing the past will lead him into some dangerous places - the brutal world of organised crime, the dirty secrets of the security establishment and an inverted skyscraper under central London that is home to all the stories Britain would rather forget...