Stephen Leather’s

London is under siege. Nine men in suicide vests primed to explode hold hostages in nine different locations around the city, and are ready to die for their cause. Their mission: to force the government to release jihadist prisoners from Belmarsh Prison. Their deadline: 6 p.m. Today.

Why would a successful Scottish businessman jeapordise the comfort and respectability of his financial career? Endanger his family and friends to plunge deep into a world of drug-dealers, hit-men and call-girls? The answer is simple: revenge. For a cold-blooded murder.

Other journalists admire and envy the foreign correspondent who is sent on emergency trips to the world’s hot spots to cover big, fast-breaking news stories; they call him “The Fireman”, a first-class operator and expert trouble-shooter who moves in, gets the story and moves out – fast, efficient, clean.

Ex-SAS hired killing machine Geoff Howells is brought out of retirement and sent to Hong Kong, his brief to assassinate a Chinese Mafia leader, Simon Ng. But Howells finds Ng is well guarded, and devises a complicated plan to reach his victim – only to find himself the next target…

Jungle-skilled, silent and lethal, Nguyen Ngoc Minh had killed for the Viet Cong and then for the Americans. Imprisoned and tortured after the Communist victory, he escaped with his wife and baby daughter to Hong Kong – but only after being forced to watch Thai pirates rape and kill his two eldest daughters.

Four men. They’ve never met, and they’ve got nothing in common – except that they all fought in Vietnam. And each in his own way has come to a crisis point in his life. When they all sign up for a veterans’ tour of Vietnam’s former combat zones, some are hoping to exorcize the past, others to simply escape the present.

The plan is so complex, the target so well protected, that the three snipers have to rehearse the killing in the seclusion of the Arizona desert. How could the assassins have known that a small aircraft would fly over their rehearsal, or that a small boy would be in the cockpit operating his father’s camcorder? All they did know was that to protect their mission the plane had to be brought down.

Tony Freeman first met Mersiha when she was a twelve-year-old killer with a Kalashnikov, fighting for her life in war-torn Yugoslavia. He rescued her from the heart of the brutal civil war and took her into his family where she grew up to be the perfect all-American teenager – pretty, vivacious, intelligent, but with an agonising secret in her past.

The assassin – the world’s most successful contract killer – ice cool, accurate and elusive. An anonymous professional with a unique calling card – one bullet in the head and one in the chest for each of his targets. The Judas goat – an ex-member of the SAS, Mike Cramer is the perfect sacrificial bait. When the FBI discover the next name on the assassin’s hitlist, Cramer is set up to take his place.

Chris Hutchison is a man on the run. Imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit, Hutch escapes from a British maximum security prison and starts a new life in Hong Kong. Then a ghost from his past catches up with him, forcing him to help a former terrorist break out of a Bangkok prison. Or face a life behind bars once more.

Two murders, thousands of miles apart: one in London, one in Bangkok. The bodies brutally mutilated: an ace of spades impaled upon their chests. In Washington, a US senator receives photographs of the corpses. And realises that his past has come back to haunt him.

Ten years ago, Andrea Hayes was the best master bombmaker in the business. Young, beautiful and deadly, she was the favourite of her Irish Republican masters. Then it all went wrong. Four children were killed when disruption was all that was intended. It all became too much and she turned away from her trade.

When career criminal Terry Greene is sentenced to life for a murder he didn’t commit, his wife has two choices. To walk away from the criminal empire he’d built up, or to take it over. To become as big a gangster as her husband ever was. So far as Samantha “Sam” Greene was concerned, there is no choice.

In different parts of London, three recruits prepare for their first day at the Metropolitan Police’s training centre at Hendon. All three had succeeded in getting into the police in spite of weaknesses. But on their first day, the assistant commissioner announces that he wants them to join a team of undercover detectives.

The idea for The Eyewitness sprang from my friendship with Gordon Bacon, a former north of England policeman who heads up the International Commission on Missing Persons in Sarajevo. Gordon and his team identify the war dead in the Balkans using state-of-the-art DNA profiling.

There’s a full moon over Los Angeles, and for police psychologist Jamie Beaverbrook that can only mean one thing: the crazies will be out in force. But when he is called into the station for a consult in the middle of the night, even the jaded Beaverbrook can’t believe his ears.

New York City. With a population of almost nineteen million people, it’s easy to remain anonymous even if you’re a serial killer, torturing and murdering beautiful young women. The killer has another victim right now, locked in a basement somewhere in the city.