James Ward has 13 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 11 narrators, with an average listener rating of 3★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is Death in a Half Foreign Country .
Death in a Half Foreign Country
Summary
When John Mordred leaves MI7, marries the woman he loves, and settles down to a relatively humdrum lifestyle, it ought to be a brave new start. But he and his wife have formerly been top-level spies, and they find the readjustment harder than they anticipated.
When - courtesy of a friend, and apparently out of the blue - they’re offered an all-expenses-paid holiday in Malta, it seems the answer to both their prayers. Sunshine, relaxation, and romance. Just what the doctor ordered.
But Malta's no ordinary tourist trap. Hidden cameras, none-too-subtle intimations of blackmail, and the murder of a professional acquaintance send them reeling back to Britain; back to what they dearly hope will be a snug nine-to-five normality.
But there's a limit to how often they can walk away. Especially when any number of foreign intelligence agencies now have hostile eyes on them. They were once two of Britain's best assets. They're currently untethered from central control. They're fair game. And actually, come to think if it, this is an excellent time to put an assassin on their tail. Get rid of them both, once and for all.
"James Ward brings protagonist John Mordred alive on the page. The author displays exceptional ability when it comes to storytelling.” (Emerald Book Review)
©2018 James Ward (P)2019 James Ward
The Vengeance of San Gennaro
Summary
By universal consensus, there’s only one exhibition worth seeing at this year’s Venice Biennale. Giuditta Cancellieri’s Il Timore di Dio, six paintings of something as yet undisclosed. Don’t bother buying tickets, though. A court order means no one’s getting in, not even the artist’s closest associates. The city’s been filling with felons. Most observers don’t think that’s an accident. At least one rumor suggests the paintings depict Italy’s most powerful gangsters, or its politicians, in compromising positions. And there are more startling conjectures. Yet for all anyone really knows, the six canvases may be completely blank. In any case, Signorina Cancellieri is no ordinary artist. A 25-year-old AIDS victim from one of the toughest districts of Naples, she’s also closely linked to one of MI7’s oldest enemies, Constantius Sopa. As the temperature rises to boiling point, MI7 Agent Gavin Freedman is dispatched from London to find out just what is going on.
©2013 James Ward (P)2018 James Ward
Libya Story
Summary
John Mordred doesn’t want to leave MI7’s Red Department, but then life has a way of twisting his arm. When his youngest sister gets kidnapped in one of the world’s worst war-zones, everyone agrees he’s the ideal person to mount a rescue...only protocol forbids it. Yet while resigning might be easy, getting out of the UK isn’t. Not when the police and the intelligence services have been warned to stop him by every means at their disposal. Even assuming he can overcome that, getting into Libya is going to be even more of a challenge. Not to mention staying alive when he arrives there. And then, actually finding his sister. Libya’s a big country, after all, and it’s mostly desert. So many obstacles, such a lot at stake. It’s going to take a shipload of luck. And probably a miracle. Or three. Or ten. In the meantime, he’s got a lot of friends in all sorts of places. And one thing he’s always known: there are good people everywhere and, with sufficient goodwill, alliances for justice - no matter how improbable - are always achievable.
©2017 James Ward (P)2019 James Ward
The Eastern Ukraine Question
Summary
A cabal of Russian oligarchs instigates unrest in the Far East of Russia as the first stage of an attempt to unseat Vladimir Putin. Britain offers covert support in the form of five MI7 agents. The disturbances mirror those in Eastern Ukraine and, if pushed far enough, might persuade the Kremlin to retract its territorial interests in Donetsk, Luhansk, and Zaporizhia. However, once the five operatives are shipped east, events take an unexpected turn. One by one, they begin to disappear. Enter Grey Department’s John Mordred, by grudging consensus, MI7’s best agent. Young, idiosyncratic, and a linguistic genius, Mordred prefers diplomacy to battle, doing the right thing to defending the realm. Yet he won’t necessarily duck a confrontation. Especially when the lives of his coagents are at stake. Which - given the job description - they usually are.... The Eastern Ukraine Question was authored in 2014, at the same time as the events that form its backdrop.
©2014 James Ward (P)2018 James Ward
The New Europeans
Summary
London, 2016, and the lead-up to the EU referendum. The liberal consensus in Europe is breaking down and no one knows exactly what will replace it. As always, there are those with an eye to the main chance. In the course of investigating the disappearance of a prominent Eurosceptic MP, MI7 agent John Mordred finds himself under hostile scrutiny from obscure figures within his own organization. It quickly turns out that his investigation and theirs may not be entirely independent of each other. Behind all the intrigues, arguments, and accusations, much greater, darker forces are coming into play. Forces whose existence hardly anyone suspects. Yet. And the stakes are high enough to make even MI7’s best agent dispensable. Set (and written) in the run-up to the 2016 UK referendum on EU membership, The New Europeans deals with the shifting global power-balance in the second decade of the 21st century.
©2016 James Ward (P)2019 James Ward
Our Woman in Jamaica
Summary
Sometimes the ballot-box and the bullet aren’t incompatible....
Jamaica, 1980. A general election is in the offing. The left-of-centre People's National Party stands a chance of winning a third term of radical social reform. Ties with Russia and Cuba will likely be strengthened. The IMF will be shown the door. Newly hatched revolutionary movements, like the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and the JRG in El Salvador, will take firm encouragement.
The powers that be in London or Washington are not prepared to countenance any of that. Not at all. Unfortunately, the only person available to address the situation is someone the Brits would rather not acknowledge. At just 25, Ruby Parker and MI6 have a fractious shared history. She has already been written off by just about everyone in that organisation who matters. Written as a prequel to the other books in the Tales of MI7 series, Our Woman in Jamaica can be enjoyed by old and new listeners alike.
©2015 James Ward (P)2019 James Ward
Little War in London
Summary
After an acrimonious US election whose outcome Moscow may or may not have influenced, can it really be that a few maverick intelligence agents from Russia and the United States are fighting a discreet battle to the death on some of London’s back streets? And that the corpses are piling up, out of sight of the British police? And even that the whole thing could spiral at any moment into God knows what version of a third world war? Or is that just more “fake news”? Well, luckily, no it isn’t. Not yet, anyway. Because the media still hasn’t heard about it. But that could change. When MI7 Agent John Mordred is assigned to investigate, he discovers a veritable Schrödinger’s cat situation in which the relevant facts are neither wholly present nor entirely absent. And where some of the evidence lies closer to home than is comfortable. Slowly, possibilities emerge that surpass his greatest apprehensions. Or do they? Just what is the truth anyway, and why do we care?
©2017 James Ward (P)2019 James Ward
World War O
Summary
The World War Offshore...no one knows how it started or who’s behind it, but one thing’s for certain: It’s the biggest anti-capitalist demonstration the world has ever seen. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators, spread across six continents, demanding an end to the “non-accountability of the one percent”, reregulation of the world’s financial services, and a new era of social justice. MI7 takes the view that it’s a problem best left to the appropriate law-enforcement agencies - with the exception of one little detail. In order to get off the ground so effectively, its organizers had to bypass GCHQ in Britain and the NSA in America. A breathtakingly impressive achievement, and possibly an ominous one. Next time, whoever does that may not be so benign. Agent John Mordred is assigned to investigate. His inquiry takes him halfway across the globe before depositing him in the Crown dependency of Jersey for what looks like a war of attrition. And then, completely out of the blue, there’s a breakthrough. Written before the publication of either the Panama Papers or the Paradise Papers, World War O tackles one of the most hotly debated topics of recent times: taxation and corporate wealth. Just what, if anything, do the rich owe to the poor?
©2015 James Ward (P)2019 James Ward
The Square Mile Murder
Summary
After a chance skirmish with an armed killer in central London, agent John Mordred ends up in hospital in a critical condition. Six weeks and a full recovery later, he’s persuaded it’s purely a police matter, so one he should forget about. But nothing in MI7 is ever that simple. There’s more to this particular incident than meets the eye, and unnamed people in high places want it investigated. They believe Mordred’s the man for the job. Add to the mix five missing IMF officials, the kidnapping of a top British financier in Venezuela, evidence of a related cover-up in Whitehall, a young and unpredictable London Lord Mayor with acute delusions of grandeur, plus - most bizarrely - persistent rumors of local UFO sightings, and things threaten to spin radically out of control. Suddenly Mordred’s life is on the line again. This time, alongside those of innumerable others. And it’s him versus the clock.
©2017 James Ward (P)2020 James Ward
Encounter with ISIS
Summary
When the 14-year-old daughter of a British government minister leaves the country to join ISIS, MI7 dispatches a cohort of agents to Turkey to intercept her en route. However, maybe not everything is as it seems. How to explain, for example, her long-standing prior antipathy to Islamofascism? Her sudden conversion to radicalism on the very day of her departure? The fact that there is neither sight nor sign of her in Istanbul - or elsewhere? Agent John Mordred is assigned to investigate. Soon, he has theories of his own, and they fly in the face of the prevailing wisdom. Along the way, he is forced to face an impossible question. How to account for the appeal, to some British citizens, of an organisation that practices genocide, mass torture, and the reduction of women to sex slaves? Barbarism seems to be banging on the doors of civilisation again, in a way unseen since the 1930s. Yet for every evil Mordred uncovers, a counterbalancing good appears. His quest leads him from London to the shores of East Africa, and to a confrontation with the all-pervading power of ideological malice.
©2015 James Ward (P)2019 James Ward
The Girl from Kandahar
Summary
What if, to save thousands of lives, you had to trigger the destruction of the only person you’d ever loved?
In Afghanistan, British secret servicewoman Marcie Brown, posing as the third wife of one of ISAF’s most trusted operatives, is killed in a drone strike.
Or at least, that’s what the official report states. Deep inside enemy territory, what remains of her body is deemed irrecoverable.
Seven thousand miles away, her grieving husband, MI7 officer Nicholas Fleming, joins a police investigation which stumbles onto an Islamist plot to bomb central London. Handed responsibility for the counter-terrorism initiative, he uncovers evidence that one of the bombers is his wife.
By degrees, the utterly unbelievable becomes plausible and, at last, undeniable.
And to make matters worse, there’s evidence that she’s slowly recovering her memory....
©2012 James Ward (P)2018 James Ward
The Ultimate Londoner
Summary
A 51-year-old pub landlord from Hammersmith, a DJ from Lambeth, a prize-winning novelist influenced by Charles Dickens, and Iain Sinclair, a young British intelligence officer: just four of the 10 contenders in 2018’s truly fabulous Ultimate Londoner competition. With a five-million-pound prize pot and an awards ceremony on the top floor of the Gherkin, it’s the last word in up-to-the-minute kudos. Or perhaps not. To begin with, no one has the faintest idea where it came from or how it garnered so much publicity. And not even the "candidates" themselves know how they were selected. For John Mordred, the intelligence officer, its unsolicited exposure is profoundly unwelcome. So far, so irritating. And inconvenient. But then the candidates start dying. As Mordred investigates, the truth slowly emerges. And it’s stranger and more shocking than anyone could possibly have imagined. The Ultimate Londoner: For whom will you vote?
©2018 James Ward (P)2019 James Ward
The Social Magus
Summary
Everyone knows UK general elections aren’t what they were. British politics, Westminster in particular, is mired in an integrity crisis. Expenses scandals, cash for questions, a tainted honours system, and other wrong-turns have deeply disillusioned the electorate. Enter Real Alternative, a bold new party with a youthful, charismatic leader, and a radical manifesto. True, it stands to win very few seats, but what matters more is that it has galvanised the young and apathetic. And apparently, it has the establishment running scared. Yet it may be more vulnerable than appears. Who’s funding it? No one quite knows. If its backers are foreign, that would constitute a clear breach of electoral commission rules. Which would please a lot of people in Whitehall. Agent John Mordred is assigned to investigate. What looks at first like a routine probe becomes much more when he discovers not only that his own sister is an integral part of Real Alternative’s setup, but that she’s having a relationship with the party leader. And that someone wants both of them dead. The Social Magus is the first of the Tales of MI7 series to be set mostly in London. Written in the run-up to the 2015 general election, it examines some of the trends and concerns that later materialised in “Corbynism” and the Momentum movement.
©2015 James Ward (P)2019 James Ward