The Chinese Widow

‘Highly absorbing account of the corruption of an individual during a particularly sordid era of British imperial history,’ The Sunday Times

‘James Leasor switches to the China Sea more than a century ago, and with pace and ingenuity tells, in novel form, how the China coast was forced to open up its riches to Englishmen, in face of the Emperor's justified hostility’ Evening Standard

‘In the nasty story of opium - European and American traders made fortunes taking the forbidden dope into nineteenth century China, and this novel tells the story of their deadly arrangements and of the Emperor's vain attempts to stop them. Mr. Leasor has researched the background carefully and the detail of the Emperor's lavish court but weak administration is fascinating. The white traders are equally interesting characters, especially those two real-life merchants, Jardine and Matheson.’ Manchester Evening News

It was the year of 1833 when Robert Gunn arrived on the China coast. Only the feeblest of defences now protected the vast and proud Chinese Empire from the ravenous greed of Western traders, and their opening wedge for conquest was the sale of forbidden opium to the native masses.
This was the path that Robert Gunn chose to follow... a path that led him through a maze of violence and intrigue, lust and treachery, to a height of power beyond most men's dreams — and to the ultimate depths of personal corruption.
Here is a magnificent novel of an age of plunder—and of a fearless freebooter who raped an empire.

Robert Gunn, founder of the Mandarin-Gold trading company, had always been quick to seize new opportunities. That had been the making of his vast Far Eastern trading empire. And when the change from sail to steam in the world's shipping made coal as valuable as gold. Gunn saw his way to another fortune. Vessels on the Eastern seas needed local supplies of fuel — and the man who discovered coal in the East would command the whole area. Enormous power for his country and himself. Gunn believed that Jade Gate Island, off Borneo, hid coal deposits, and there were others who shared his belief. In a land where life was cheap and the prize incalculable, the race for coal was likely to be a fight to the death ...
To the powerful and arrogant Dr. Robert Gunn, life 'might be likened to a fierce race for enormous prizes'. No prize could be richer than the discovery of coal on Jade Gate Island - but then no race could be fiercer, more uncertain, or more violent....
‘Jade Gate’ is the final book in the Robert Gunn trilogy, following on from the acclaimed best-sellers, ‘Mandarin-Gold’ and ‘The Chinese Widow’.

'Once in a while, a book comes along that grabs you by the throat, shakes you, and won't let go until you have read through to the last page.' - Hal Burton, Newsday

'Follow the Drum is superb reading entertainment' - Best Sellers

India, in the mid-nineteenth century, was virtually run by a British commercial concern, the Honourable East India Company, whose directors would pay tribute to one Indian ruler and then depose another in their efforts to maintain their balance sheet of power and profit. But great changes were already casting shadows across the land, and when a stupid order was given to Indian troops to use cartridges greased with cow fat and pig lard (one animal sacred to the Hindus and the other abhorrent to Moslems) there was mutiny. The lives of millions were changed for ever including Arabella MacDonald, daughter of an English regular officer, and Richard Lang, an idealistic nineteen-year-old who began 1857 as a boy and ended it a man.

'A superb example of thriller writing at its best' - Sunday Express
'Third of Dr Love's supercharged adventures... It starts in the sunshine of the Bahamas, swings rapidly by way of a brunette corpse into Mexico, and winds up in the yacht of a megalomaniac ex-Nazi... Action: non-stop: Tension: nail-biting' - Daily Express
'His ingenuity and daring are as marked as ever' - Birmingham Post
When a German submarine mysteriously disappears on a NATO exercise in the North Sea, and a beautiful girl was brutally murdered in the Bahamas, there at first seemed little connection between the two events.  But the missing sub was a vital link in a deadly plan to conquer the West, master-minded by a megalomaniac ex-Nazi.  And the dead girl was an Israeli agent intent on bringing to trial the ex-Nazis hiding in South America.
Dr Jason Love, the Somerset GP–turned part-time British secret agent, was enjoying a quiet holiday in Nassau, on his way to an old car rally in Mexico, when he witnessed the girl’s murder.  Before he knew it, he found himself dragged into the affair.  He duly travels to Mexico, thinking he has left this behind, but becomes plunged into a violent situation, with his life in danger – and a desperate mission to foil a terrifying plot to destroy Western civilisation as we know it…

‘This is a battle piece of the finest kind, detailed, authentic and largely written from original documents. Mr. Leasor has a formidable gift of narrative. Never has this story of hate, violence, courage and cowardice been better told.’
Cecil Woodham-Smith in the New York Times

A year after the Crimean War ended, an uprising broke out in India which was to have equal impact on the balance of world power and the British Empire's role in world affairs.
The revolt was against the East India Company which, not entirely against its will, had assumed responsibility for administering large parts of India. The ostensible cause of the mutiny sprang from a rumour that cartridges used by the native Sepoy troops were greased with cow's fat and pig's lard —cows being sacred to the Hindus, and pigs abhorred by the Mohammedans. But the roots of the trouble lay far deeper, and a bloody and ineptly handled war ensued.
The Red Fort is a breathtaking account of the struggle, with all its cruelties, blunderings and heroic courage. When peace was finally restored, the India we know today began to emerge.

In 1942 radar expert Jack Nissenthall volunteered for a suicidal mission to join a combat team who were making a surprise landing at Dieppe in occupied France. His assignment was to penetrate a German radar station on a cliff above “Green Beach”. Because Nissenthall knew the secrets of British and US radar technology, he was awarded a personal bodyguard of sharpshooters. Their orders were to protect him, but in the event of possible capture lo kill him. .His choice was to succeed or die. The story of what happened to him and his bodyguards in nine hours under fire is one of World War IIs most terrifying true stories of personal heroism