The Long Suit

A crisp clean softcover, no markings throughout:\nOn the second green of a Long Island golf-course there are three golf balls and a corpse with a bullet-hole in his forehead. The call goes out for Harry Fielding - that guardian angel with wet wings and a five-o'clock shadow - to come in from the cold. With a new suit and a new partner, Harry is back where he least wants to be: playing the deadly games of MI5. Always a triangular peg in a square hole, Harry has never felt easy with the protocol, the procedure and the need-to-know principles of the British secret service - particularly at the sleazy, turbid end of the pool in which he has to swim. And it doesn't help that his apprentice, Johnny Weeks, is a troublemaker with the measured diffidence of a French waiter and the volatility of a paid-up psychopath. Harry is going back to the work he hates but does so well, while all he really wants is to rekindle his relationships with his ailing, amnesiac father and his ex-wife - who appears to be sleeping with his boss. Will this be his last chance: the fresh start that will restore moral equilibrium to a life turned turtle, to a crooked man who wants to go straight?