A Ben Webster Novel Series

An unlikely hero dives into the chaos and madness of Russia and Georgia’s deadly covert conflict, in this rapid-fire tale of corporate espionage gone awry
 
The acclaimed author of The Silent Oligarch and The Jackal’s Share, Christopher Morgan Jones returns to a murky world where corporate spies and government agents battle far from the public eye. Focusing on Georgia, a mountainous republic dominated and threatened by its neighbor Russia, Morgan Jones carries readers deep into an ancient land of chilling compromises and foolhardy valor.
 
Morgan Jones’s novels center on a unique London corporate espionage firm, spearheaded by Ike Hammer and Ben Webster, which follows criminal money anywhere it leads: be it Moscow or Dubai, Monaco or Kazakhstan, a bureaucrat’s pockets or a politician’s bank account. While Webster was the star of the earlier novels—investigating Russian businessmen and KGB operatives in The Silent Oligarch and Persian billionaires and Tehran terrorists in The Jackal’s Share—in The Searcher the focus shifts provocatively to Hammer, making this a perfect starting point for old fans and new readers alike.
 
Journeying to Georgia for the funeral of a friend, a journalist who inexplicably commits suicide after publishing the exposé of a lifetime, Webster mysteriously disappears. As the country rumbles ominously with civil strife and Russian aggression, Hammer rushes to Tbilisi to track down his missing friend. There he is forced to confront the country’s tragic chaos: civilians bombed either by cruel Russian spies or by deceitful Georgian soldiers; violent riots instigated by amoral oligarchs or government saboteurs; and double and even triple agents who are playing all sides against each other at once. Threatened by enemies he cannot name and “friends” he cannot trust, Hammer hurries north—into the lawless mountains bordering Russia itself—to discover the true fate of his friend and Georgia’s future.

“Terrific news for fans of first-class thrillers.” –Maureen Corrigan, NPR.org

A murder in a Tehran hotel leaves the London art world spinning. The deceased, beloved at home as a proud dealer in antiquities, now stands accused of smuggling artifacts out of Iran for sale in the West. But despite the triumphal announcements of the secret police, there is something perhaps too tidy in the official report—given that no artifacts have been recovered, no smuggling history discovered, no suspects found.

Half a world away, Darius Qazai delivers a stiring eulogy for his departed friend. A fabulously successful financier, Qazai has directed his life and wealth toward philanthropy, art preservation, and peaceful protest against the regime of his native Iran. His fortune, colossal; his character, immaculate. Pleasantly ensconced in the world of the London expatriate elite, Qazai is the last person anyone would suspect of foul play. Yet something ominous is disrupting Qazai’s recent business deals, some rumor from his past so frightening to his American partners that they will no longer speak to him.

So Qazai hires a respectable corporate intelligence firm to investigate himself and clear his reputation. A veteran of intelligence work in the former Soviet Union, Ben Webster soon discovers that Qazai’s pristine past is actually a dense net of interlocking half-truths and unanswered questions: Is he a respectable citizen or an art smuggler? Is his fortune built on merit or on arms dealing? Is he, after all, his own man? As he closes in on the truth of Qazai’s fortune—and those who would wish to destroy it—Webster discovers he may pay for that knowledge with the lives of his own family.

A vivid and relentless tale of murderous corporate espionage, The Jackal’s Share follows the money through the rotten alleys of Marrakech and the shining spires of Dubai, from the idyllic palaces of Lake Como to the bank houses of London’s City. The Jackal’s Share plunges readers into a Middle East as strange and raw as ever depicted, where recent triumphs rest uneasily atop buried crimes and monumental greed.

Christopher Morgan Jones’s newest book, The Searcher, will be published by Penguin Press on March 22nd, 2016.

“A happy partner to the work of Deighton, Archer, and le Carré… carried on craftily understated prose that approaches cold poetry… a first-class novel.” (Booklist, starred review)

Racing between London and Moscow, Kazakstan and the Caymans, The Silent Oligarch reveals a sinister unexplored world where the wealthy buy the justice they want—and the silence they need. Here private spy agencies duel for dominance, governments eagerly defer to the highest bidder, and colossal wealth is amassed through shadowy networks of companies. But where the money actually flows—and who benefits from such corruption—is something necessarily hidden, sometimes in plain sight.  Behind the imposing splendor of the Kremlin rises a run-down office building, home to the Russian Ministry of Natural Resources. A nondescript bureaucrat in a drab government agency, Konstanin Malin secretly controls a vast business that dominates the nation’s oil industry, making him one of the most feared and wealthy men in Russia. Over the years Malin has siphoned billions from the state and poured them into his private empire, hiding what he owns offshore.The man who has done the hiding is Richard Lock, a diffident English lawyer whose life in Moscow is falling apart: criss-crossing the world administering his master’s affairs, he has seen his relationships with his estranged family and highly practical mistress slowly deteriorating. Lock is bound to Malin by marriage, complacency, greed, and most of all by a complex lie that neither can escape. But slowly, Lock is beginning to realise that the lie will not always hold.Once an idealistic young journalist, Benjamin Webster now works as an investigator at a London corporate intelligence firm, a mercenary spy for the rich and powerful. Webster’s cynicism and anger were born when he witnessed a colleague murdered in Russia for asking too many tough questions; now, ten years later, he may finally be able to avenge her unsolved murder. Hired by a client to ruin Malin, he discovers that this shadowy figure may have arranged his friend’s gruesome death—to hide a terrible secret buried at the heart of his criminal empire.Soon Webster realizes that Lock is Malin’s great weakness; and when he starts to apply pressure, Lock’s fragile world begins to crack. His colleagues begin dying mysteriously, his relationship with Malin turns ominously ice-cold. The police begin asking questions, the newspapers smell blood in the water, and Webster’s investigators close in on the truth. Suddenly Lock is running for his life—though from Malin or Webster, the law or his own past, he couldn’t say.A heart-pounding hunt around the world, through opulent boardrooms and anonymous hotels, The Silent Oligarch is a chilling and unforgettable novel of our time.

Christopher Morgan Jones’s newest book, The Searcher, will be published by Penguin Press on March 22nd, 2016.