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John Lawton

John Lawton’s debut novel: a stunning, WWII thriller introducing Scotland Yard Detective Sergeant Troy. “A delightful, intelligent, involving book” (Scott Turow).

The first of the Inspector Troy novels, Black Out singularly captures the realities of wartime London, weaving them into a riveting drama that encapsulates the uncertainty of Europe at the dawn of the postwar era.

London, 1944. While the Luftwaffe makes its final assault on the already battered British capital, Londoners rush through the streets, seeking underground shelter in the midst of the city’s black out. When the panic subsides, other things begin to surface along with London’s war-worn citizens …

A severed arm is discovered by a group of children playing at an East End bomb site, and when Scotland Yard’s Det. Sgt. Frederick Troy arrives at the scene, it becomes apparent that the dismembered body is not the work of a V-1 rocket. After Troy manages to link the severed arm to the disappearance of a refugee scientist from Nazi Germany, America’s newest intelligence agency, the OSS, decides to get involved. The son of a titled Russian émigré, Troy is forced to leave the London he knows and enter a corrupt world of bloody consequences, stateless refugees, and mysterious women as he unearths a chain of secrets leading straight to the Allied high command.

“An exciting, fast-moving mystery set against the backdrop of the London blitz in 1944. ” —Booklis

Grove Press

The Inspector Troy Novels

Black Out

Scotland Yard’s Inspector Troy returns in a Cold War spy thriller hailed as “stylish, sophisticated, suspenseful … A fictional tour de force” (Patrick Anderson, The Washington Post).

In April 1956, at the height of the Cold War, Khrushchev and Bulganin, leaders of the Soviet Union, are in Britain on an official visit. Chief Inspector Troy of Scotland Yard is assigned to be Khrushchev’s bodyguard and to spy on him. Soon after, a Royal Navy diver is found dead and mutilated beyond recognition in Portsmouth Harbor. Troy embarks on an investigation that takes him to the rotten heart of MI6, to the distant days of his childhood, and into the dangerous arms of an old flame.

“If Troy is the character at the heart of this novel, its soul is England as it was during the Cold War years, a country fueled by paranoia and espionage, overrun with agents and counter-agents, caught up, as Troy says, in ‘an age that specialized in thinking the unthinkable. ’” —Anne Stephenson, USA Today

Atlantic Monthly Press

Old Flames

“[Lawton’s] work stands head and shoulders above most other contemporary thrillers, earning those comparisons to Le Carré. ” —The Boston Globe

The latest novel from the master spy novelist John Lawton follows Inspector Troy, now Scotland Yard’s chief detective, deep into a scandal reminiscent of the infamous Profumo affair.

England in 1963 is a country set to explode. The old guard, shocked by the habits of the war baby youth, sets out to fight back. The battle reaches uncomfortably close to Troy. While he is on medical leave, the Yard brings charges against an acquaintance of his, a hedonistic doctor with a penchant for voyeurism and young women, two of which just happen to be sleeping with a senior man at the Foreign Office as well as a KGB agent.

But on the eve of the verdict, a curious double case of suicide drags Troy back into active duty. Beyond bedroom acrobatics, the secret affairs now stretch to double crosses and deals in the halls of power, not to mention murder. It’s all Troy can do to stay afloat in a country immersed in drugs and up to its neck in scandal.

“John Lawton is so captivating a storyteller that I’d happily hear him out on any subject. ” —Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review

A Little White Death

A serial killer stalks post-WWII London in a gritty detective novel featuring Scotland Yard’s Inspector Troy.

An old flame has returned to Troy’s life: Kitty Stilton, wife of an American presidential hopeful. Private eye Joey Rork has been hired to make sure Kitty’s amorous liaisons with a rat pack crooner don’t ruin her husband’s political career. But he also wants to know why Kitty has been spotted with Danny Ryan, whose twin brothers, in addition to owning one of London’s hottest jazz clubs, are said to have inherited the crime empire of a fallen mobster.

Before Rork can find out, he meets a gruesome end. And he isn’t the only one: bodies have started turning up around London, dismembered in the same bizarre and horrifying way. Is it possible that the blood trail leads back to Troy’s own police force and into Troy’s own forgotten past? Flesh Wounds, a compulsively readable thriller, finds one of our most able storytellers at the height of his game.

“There are characters based on (or at least inspired by) everyone from Frank Sinatra to Meyer Lansky, enough dismembered bodies to satisfy the most morbid imaginations and frequent flashes of sly wit and social conscience that illuminate a vanished world. ” —Publishers Weekly

Flesh Wounds

As London braces for WWII, a string of murdered rabbis draws Inspector Troy into a mystery that “sets pulses racing and the jaded responses tingling” (The Irish Times).

One of today’s top historical espionage writers, considered “as good as Le Carré” (Chicago Tribune) and “a master, ” John Lawton adds another spellbinding thriller to his Inspector Troy series with Second Violin (Rocky Mountain News).

The sixth instalment in the series, Lawton’s new novel opens in 1938 with Europe on the brink of war. In London, Frederick Troy, newly promoted to the prestigious murder squad at Scotland Yard, is put in charge of rounding up a list of German and Italian “enemy aliens” that also includes his brother, Rod, who learns upon receiving an internment letter that he was born in Austria despite having grown up in England. Hundreds of men are herded by train to a neglected camp on the Isle of Man. And as the bombs start falling on London, a murdered rabbi is found, then another, and another …

Amid great war, murder is what matters. Moving from the Nazi-infested alleys of prewar Vienna to the bombed-out streets of 1940 London, and featuring an extraordinary cast of characters, Lawton’s thriller is a suspenseful and intelligent novel, as good a spy story as it is an historical narrative.

“Smart and gracefully written. ” —Patrick Anderson, The Washington Post

Second Violin

Inspector Troy of Scotland Yard returns in “one of the best thrillers of the year” (Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review).

Spanning the tumultuous years 1934 to 1948, John Lawton’s A Lily of the Field is a brilliant historical thriller from a master of the form. The book follows two characters—Méret Voytek, a talented young cellist living in Vienna at the novel’s start, and Dr. Karel Szabo, a Hungarian physicist interned in a camp on the Isle of Man.

In his seventh Inspector Troy novel, Lawton moves seamlessly from Vienna and Auschwitz to the deserts of New Mexico and the rubble-strewn streets of postwar London, following the fascinating parallels of the physicist Szabo and musician Voytek as fate takes each far from home and across the untraditional battlefields of a destructive war to an unexpected intersection at the novel’s close. The result, A Lily of the Field, is Lawton’s best book yet, a historically accurate and remarkably written novel that explores the diaspora of two Europeans from the rise of Hitler to the post-atomic age.

“Lawton’s thrillers provide a vivid, moving and wonderfully absorbing way to experience life in London and on the Continent before, during and after World War II. ” —The Washington Post

A Lily of the Field

Inspector Troy of Scotland Yard stars in thriller that’s “part murder mystery, part spy tale … a wickedly seductive entertainment” (TheWashington Post).

London, 1958. Chief Superintendent Frederick Troy of Scotland Yard, newly promoted after good service during Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to Britain, is not looking forward to a European trip with his older brother, Rod. Rod has decided to take his entire family on “the Grand Tour” for his fifty-first birthday: a whirlwind of restaurants, galleries, and concert halls from Paris to Florence to Vienna to Amsterdam.

But Frederick Troy only gets as far as Vienna. It is there that he crosses paths with an old acquaintance, a man who always seems to be followed by trouble: British-spy-turned-Soviet-agent Guy Burgess. Suffice it to say that Troy is more than surprised when Burgess, who has escaped from the bosom of Moscow for a quick visit to Vienna, tells him something extraordinary: “I want to come home. ” Troy knows this news will cause a ruckus in London—but even Troy doesn’t expect an MI5 man to be gunned down as a result, with Troy himself suspected of doing the deed …

“An artful blend of two ever-popular subjects: espionage and British police work. ” —The Seattle Times

“The surprises keep coming, not merely up to the last chapter but even to the novel’s very last line. ” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Lawton’s superb eighth Inspector Troy novel … [a] smart, fascinating historical thriller. ” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A beguiling interpretation of [Guy] Burgess’ life both before and after his defection in 1951. ” —Booklist (starred review)