Jack of Spies

David Downing

eBook - 2014

This complex and “always entertaining” British spy novel takes readers to a thrilling moment in history—the dawn of 20th-century espionage (Washington Post). On the eve of WWI, a Scottish car salesman’s ‘innocent’ data-gathering plunges him into a high-stakes game of espionage he never expected. It is 1913, and those who follow the news closely can see the world is teetering on the brink of war. Jack McColl, a Scottish car salesman with an uncanny ear for languages, has always hoped to make a job for himself as a spy. As his sales calls take him from city to great city—Hong Kong to Shanghai to San Francisco to New York—he moonlights collecting intelligence for His Majesty’s Secret Service, but British espionage is in its... infancy and Jack has nothing but a shoestring budget and the very tenuous protection of a boss in far-away London. He knows, though, that a geopolitical... more