Condor: 'You must obey the second order.'

The young girl flinches as she’s sewn into a suicide vest

A young girl detonates her suicide vest on a crowded London bus. Ex-SAS covert agent Gabriel Wolfe is caught up in the carnage. Rushing to help the bleeding and traumatised victims he sees his own bloodied face reflected in hundreds of steel ball-bearings. The nightmarish vision triggers his PTSD but it also goads him into action.

Wolfe calls his boss at The Department. ‘I want to find the man who ordered this. Find him. And kill him. That man is a delusional French psychopath called Christophe Jardin.

Fine wine, classical music … and extreme violence

The angry child of upper-class Marxists, Jardin has a taste for classical music, fine wine and extreme violence.

Styling himself ‘Père Christophe’, he runs a pseudo-religious cult deep in the Amazonian rainforest in Brazil. He recruits his disciples in London then selects the prettiest and the most vulnerable to join him at his compound where he indulges his depraved appetites.

To get to Jardin, Wolfe will have to face down a sadistic Colombian cartel boss and a vicious biker gang.

“To join us you must give up everything”

Working alongside Metropolitan Police anti-terror officers, Gabriel infiltrates the cult by posing as a willing disciple. But when he travels to Brazil, things go badly wrong. Lost and alone in the cult's compound in the Brazilian rainforest, Gabriel is tortured, brainwashed and fitted with his own suicide bomb.

With the stakes raised to breaking point, Gabriel needs to draw on all his training and resources to avoid obliterating a crowd of civilians at the launch of a new power station before returning to confront the man he came to kill. Where he receives a mind-numbing shock that almost destroys him.

Readers’ opinions

“A hundred miles an hour adventure tale which starts with a suicide bombing of a London bus. On a trail of vengeance Gabriel travels far and wide to avenge these deaths and nearly becomes a victim himself in the hands of a cult that has death at its heart. The tension lasts throughout this well told tale. You'll find it hard to put it down.” Richard Cole

“The pace of the narrative is fantastic and draws you right on to the next chapter. I really like the way Andy Maslen creates his locations. Whether the hero is in Oxford Street or in the jungle or the English countryside, he somehow manages to conjure up all the sights, sounds and smells to convince you it's real.” H.V. Sherborne

© 2026 Simon Maverick UK (Lydbog): 9781398570160

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Lydbog: 10. september 2026