Brian Freemantle

Brian Freemantle is an author and journalist who was twice approached to be a KGB spy, survived a machine gun ambush in Vietnam - from where he saved the lives of 100 orphans days before Saigon fell to North Vietnamese communist forces - and escaped a murder contract taken out by a Colombian drugs lord.

He's published 96 books, 18 of them featuring his internationally acclaimed anti-hero Charlie Muffin: Red Star Falling, published in June 2013, completes the trilogy Red Star Rising, Red Star Burning and Red Star Falling. The first eponymously entitled CHARLIE MUFFIN was adapted for international television and film distribution and issued on DVD in 2010 as one of the iconic movies of the 1980s.

In 1986 he was nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe award by the Mystery Writers of America.

In the opinion of The Philadelphia Enquirer, 'If Brian Freemantle isn't the best writer of spy novels around, he's he's certainly, along with John le Carre, in the top two....it doesn't get much better than this.'

The Chicago Tribune said 'His thrillers are both sleek and tough, filled with gritty characters and superb plotting.'

Booklist went as far as to say 'Freemantle, certainly one of the top espionage writers today, may very well be one of the best of all time.'

And the judgement of the Washington Post was 'Impossible to put down, marvellous: real genius.

All of which was topped when Ernest Hemingway's fourth wife and widow, journalist and author Martha Gillhorn, sought him out at a dinner hosted by the Howard Gottlieb Memorial Library in Boston University, Mass. holders of both their archives, to tell him: 'I've read every one of your books and know Ernest would have loved them as much as I have done.'

RED STAR RISING

Brian Freemantle, St. Martin's/Dunne, $25.99 (368p) ISBN 978-0-312-31553-5

Last seen in 2002’s Kings of Many Castles, working-class British spy Charlie Muffin once again proves that experience and intelligence (on the part of both author and hero) are at least as important as flying fists and explosions in this entertaining entry in Freemantle's long-running series. (Aug.)