Six novels have been announced for the inaugural Spymasters book prize.
The Peacock and the Sparrow by IS Berry
Gabriel’s Moon by William Boyd
Spy Hunter by HB Lyle
Honour Among Spies by Merle Nygate
Midnight in Vienna by Jane Thynne
Shadow of Poison by Peter Tonkin
The winner will be announced at a special prize-giving event on the evening of 3rd September 2025.
Aspects of History have announced their longlist for their Inaugural SpyMasters Book Prize.
Spy Hunter by HB Lyle
The Old Fox by Robert Perkins
Paying in Blood by Karen Haden
Committed by Chris Merritt
Second Skin by Dugald Bruce-Lockhart
The King Street Affair by Jon Sealy
Shadow of Poison by Peter Tonkin
The Borodino Sacrifice by Paul Phillips
Out in the Cold by Steve Urszenyi
Soldier Spy by Rosemary Hayes
The Violin & the Candlestick by David Jarvis
Mr Campion’s Christmas by Mike Ripley
Honour Among Spies by Merle Nygate
The Peacock and the Sparrow by IS Berry
Foxtrot Mike Lima by Cat Connor
Operation Nightfall by Karl Wegener
Death of a Princess by R.N.Morris
With Prejudice by Roger Price
Midnight in Vienna by Jane Thynne
Found by Will Erikson
Gabriel’s Moon by William Boyd
The award is open to any spy novel, published in hardback or paperback, in 2024. They accepted both historical and modern spy thrillers
A cash prize of £500 will be awarded to the winning author. Aspects of HIstory will also interview the winner on the SpyMasters podcast. A shortlist of six titles will then be announced on 1st September 2025.
The winner will be announced at a special event in September, at which the longlist and special guests will be invited. Congratulations to all the nominated authors.
February 2022
Berlin, 1989. Anne Simpson, an American who works as a translator at the Joint Operations Refugee Committee, thinks she is in a normal marriage with a charming East German. But then her husband disappears and the CIA and Western German intelligence arrive at her door. Nothing about her marriage is as it seems. Anne had been targeted by the Matchmaker - a high level East German counterintelligence officer - who runs a network of Stasi agents. These agents are his 'Romeos' who marry vulnerable women in West Berlin to provide them with cover as they report back to the Matchmaker. Anne has been married to a spy, and now he has disappeared, and is presumably dead. The CIA are desperate to find the Matchmaker because of his close ties to the KGB. They believe he can establish the truth about a high-ranking Soviet defector. They need Anne because she's the only person who has seen his face - from a photograph that her husband mistakenly left out in his office - and she is the CIA's best chance to identify him before the Matchmaker escapes to Moscow. Time is running out as the Berlin Wall falls and chaos engulfs East Germany. But what if Anne's husband is not dead? And what if Anne has her own motives for finding the Matchmaker to deliver a different type of justice? The Matchmaker is by Paul Vidich.
March 2022
Shoot The Moonlight Out is by William Boyle. Southern Brooklyn, July 1996. Fire hydrants are open and spraying water on the sizzling blacktop. Punk kids have to make their own fun. Bobby Santovasco and his pal Zeke like to throw rocks at cars getting off the Belt Parkway. They think it's dumb and harmless until it's too late to think otherwise. Then there's Jack Cornacchia, a widower who lives with his high school age daughter Amelia and reads meters for Con Ed but also has a secret life as a vigilante, righting neighbourhood wrongs through acts of violence. A simple mission to strong-arm a Bay Ridge con man, Max Berry, leads him to cross paths with a tragedy that hits close to home. Fast forward five years: June 2001. The summer before New York City and the world changed for good. Charlie French is a low-level gangster-wannabe trying to make a name for himself. When he stumbles onto a bowling alley locker stuffed with a bag full of cash, he brings it to his only pal, Max Berry, for safekeeping while he cleans up the mess surrounding it. Bobby Santovasco - with no real future mapped out and the big sin of his past shining brightly in his rearview mirror - has taken a job working as an errand boy for Max Berry. On a recruiting run for Max's Ponzi scheme, Bobby meets Francesca Clarke, born in the neighbourhood but an outsider nonetheless. They hit it off. Bobby gets the idea to knock off Max's safe so he and Francesca can escape Brooklyn forever. Little does he know what Charlie French has stashed there. Meanwhile, Bobby's former stepsister, Lily Murphy, is back home in the neighbourhood after college, teaching a writing class in the basement of St. Mary's church. She's also being stalked by her college boyfriend. One of her students is Jack Cornacchia. When she opens up to him about her stalker, Jack decides to take matters into his own hands.
April 2022
A Dangerous Language is by Sulari Gentill. When Rowland Sinclair volunteers his services as a pilot to fly the renowned international peace advocate, Egon Kisch, between Freemantle and Melbourne, he is unaware of how hard Australia's new Attorney General will fight to keep the reporter off Australian soil. In this, it seems, the government is not alone, as clandestine right-wing militias target Kisch...A Communist agent is murdered on the steps of Parliament House and Rowland finds himself drawn into a dangerous world of politics and assassination. Once again, he stands against the unthinkable with an artist, a poet and brazen sculptress by his side...
'When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw' - Nelson Mandela. 1964, Apartheid South Africa. Danie du Plessis, the son of a conservative Afrikaner family, is poised to start a glittering legal academic career at one of South Africa\'s leading universities, when he falls in love with a student, Amy Coetzee. But there\'s a problem: he\'s white, she\'s not. Facing arrest, imprisonment and ruin, the couple flee South Africa, and settle in Cambridge, where friends find them positions at the University. They marry and have two children, and have seemingly put the past, and South Africa, behind them. But in 1968 Art Pienaar enters their lives, and, insisting that they have a duty to fight back, enlists their help in increasingly dangerous schemes to undermine the South African regime. When Pienaar and a notorious drug dealer, Vince Cummings, are found murdered together, Danie\'s activities come to light, and he and his family find themselves in mortal danger. Danie is also threatened with criminal prosecution on behalf of a government desperate to maintain good relations with the apartheid regime. Danie knows he\'s sailed close to the wind. But has he become an outlaw? Can Ben Schroeder persuade a jury that the answer is no? To Become an Outlaw is by Peter Murphy.
When Rowland Sinclair is invited to take his yellow Mercedes onto the Marouba Speedway, popularly known as the Killer Track, he agrees without caution or reserve. But then people start to die... The body of a journalist covering the race is found in a House of Horrors, an English blue blood with Blackshirt affiliations is killed on the race track... and it seems that someone has Rowland in their sights... With danger presenting at every turn, and the brakes long since disengaged, Rowland Sinclair hurtles towards disaster with an artist, a poet and brazen sculptress along for the ride. Give The Devil His Due is by Sulari Gentill.
All The Tears in China is by Sulari Gentill. Shanghai in 1935 is a 20th century Babylon, an expatriate playground where fortunes are made and lost, where East and West collide, and the stakes include life itself. Into this cultural melting pot, Rowland Sinclair arrives from Sydney to represent his brother at international wool negotiations. The black sheep of the family, Rowland is under strict instructions to commit to nothing - but a brutal murder makes that impossible. As suspicion falls on him, Rowland enters a desperate bid to find answers in a city ruled by taipans and tycoons, where politics and vice are entwined with commerce, and where the only people he can truly trust are his long-term friends, an artist, a poet and a free-spirited sculptress.
May 2022
Robert B Parker's Stone's Throw is by Mike Lupica. The town of Paradise receives a tragic shock when the mayor is discovered dead, his body lying in a shallow grave on a property on the lake. It's ostensibly suicide, but Jesse has his doubts... especially because the piece of land where the man was found is the subject of a contentious and dodgy land deal. Two powerful moguls are fighting over the right to buy and develop the prime piece of real estate, and one of them has brought in a hired gun, an old adversary of Jesse's: Wilson Cromartie, aka Crow. Meanwhile, the town council is debating if they want to sacrifice Paradise's stately character for the economic boost of a glitzy new development. Tempers are running hot, and as the deaths begin to mount, it's increasingly clear that the mayor may have standing in the wrong person's way.
Dean, whose previous designs include the covers of Ian McEwan's Atonement and Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, said the book's title was her starting point.
The audiobook edition of the novel, published in September, will be narrated by actor Dominic West.
