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Extract: Star of the North by D.B. John

Star of the North

An explosive thriller set in North Korea

This is the most explosive thriller of the year - you won't be able to put it down.

'Extraordinary...smart, sophisticated, suspenseful - and important. If you try one new thing this year, make it Star of the North' LEE CHILD 
__________________________ 
 
North Korea and the USA are on the brink of war. 
 
A young American woman disappears without trace from a South Korean island. 
 
The CIA recruits her twin sister to uncover the truth. 
 
Now, she must go undercover in the world’s most deadly state. 
 
Only by infiltrating the dark heart of the terrifying regime will she be able to save her sister…and herself. 
___________________________ 
 
‘Tense and compelling.’ James Swallow, Sunday Times bestselling author of NOMAD

Extraordinary ... smart, sophisticated, suspenseful - and important. If you try one new thing this year, make it Star of the North.

Lee Child, bestselling author of the Jack Reacher thrillers

James Swallow, Sunday Times bestselling author of NOMAD

A superior thriller…steeped in the intrigue, culture and family of a closed regime.

Andrew Gross, New York Times bestselling author

[Y]ou should read this forensic exposure of the horrors of [Kim Jong-un’s] regime in this Tom Clancy-style evocation of what life there is actually like… Fast-moving and compelling, it provides the perfect fictional backdrop to the summit diplomacy we are now witnessing.

[John] parlays his knowledge into a grim but incisive narrative…. This is a masterly evocation of life under the Kim Jong-il regime.

The country has long tried to hide the terrible realities of life under the Kim dynasty, but John’s new novel, a timely political thriller…strips them bare.

A thrilling tale of abduction and escape in North Korea...highly entertaining...Star of the North builds to a gripping climax.

John uses three memorable primary characters to tell a remarkable story about the most opaque country on Earth: North Korea … The lives of these people collide in a harrowing thriller that exposes an amazingly corrupt regime that embraces savage brutality and nearly every kind of lucrative criminal enterprise … a superior thriller.

Star of The North reads like a cross between Child-44 and I am Pilgrim and is every bit as good as both of them. Read this book and you will not only feel that you've been to North Korea you will also never, ever want to go there. Brutally realistic, fascinatingly detailed, it's a fantastic thriller whose fantasy is all the more powerful for being based on truth.

Simon Toyne, bestselling author of the Sanctus trilogy and Solomon Creed series

The timeliest thriller of 2018. An intricately constructed puzzle box of spies and tradecraft that plunges the reader on a cyanide-laced sprint through North Korea.

Matthew Fitzsimmons, bestselling author of The Short Drop

An outstanding thriller that brings to life the seldom-seen underbelly of North Korea ….those seeking a realistic, highly readable look at North Korea will be rewarded.

Brims with marvellous characters and delivers heart-in-your-throat action.

Steve Berry, New York Times bestselling author

Original, cleverly plotted and easy to read...After a brilliant set up it’s action all the way to the...nail biting and powerful conclusion.

As gripping as it is shocking, this is an adrenaline-rush of a thriller that is also a devastating portrayal of a brutal regime. I couldn’t pull myself away.

Sabine Durrant, bestselling author of LIE WITH ME

Not only brilliantly plotted, with espionage, secrecy, and obsession, it’s a story about survivors, told by three complex and fully realised characters, each battling their own personal demons. John portrays the hardships of North Korea and its people with painful accuracy while never losing sight of their humanity. This one is definitely a star.

Chevy Stevens, New York Times bestselling author of Never Let You Go and Still Missing

An exhilarating, tightly-plotted page-turner - and a very moving one, too. Full of characters who will capture your heart and have you staying up far too late to find out their fate.

Emily Koch, author of IF I DIE BEFORE I WAKE

A fascinating, disturbing insight into this secretive country

I’ll never again find anything funny about podgy North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, after reading this ripped-from-the-front-pages thriller.

[A] multistranded espionage thriller…told with drama and flair.

John’s achievement is to embed these revelations in a vivid, convincing thriller. Long passages of undigested research are mercifully absent and it never feels like a mere pretext for an info-dump

‘[John] tells his exciting story well and is a fine writer of action scenes. But what really makes the book unmissable is its portrayal of everyday life for ordinary people in North Korea

-         [A]n exceptionally exciting and stylish thriller

[A] cast of marvellous characters and a storyline that blows your senses

It’s a good plot, greatly enriched by the portrait of the totalitarian society that John draws

A gripping novel of extraordinary insight… The fiction grips and the reality behind it bites – hard. A terrific and disturbing read

D. B. John has lived in South Korea and is one of the few Westerners to have visited North Korea. He co-authored The Girl With Seven Names, Hyeonseo Lee’s New York Times bestselling memoir about her escape from North Korea.

'Extraordinary...smart, sophisticated, suspenseful - and important. If you try one new thing this year, make it Star of the North' LEE CHILD 
 
 North Korea and the USA are on the brink of war. 
 
 A young American woman disappears without trace from a South Korean island. 
 
 The CIA recruits her twin sister to uncover the truth. 
 
 Now, she must go undercover in the world’s most deadly state. 
 
 Only by infiltrating the dark heart of the terrifying regime will she be able to save her sister…and herself. 
 
‘Tense and compelling.’ James Swallow, Sunday Times bestselling author of NOMAD

D. B. John

A compelling and suspenseful thriller that kept me gripped throughout

A richly satisfying thriller on an epic scale, magnificently conceived and brilliantly executed

Immensely enjoyable. A rich, epic thriller in the grand tradition ... This is exactly what a contemporary thriller should be: a gripping narrative with intriguing twists, vivid characters and well-drawn settings that is not merely very well researched about geopolitics but sheds new light on them too

A delightfully audacious spy story… a lot of fun to read, not least for John’s insight that for the three autocratic leaders [Trump, Putin, Kim Jong Un] politics has become…more about dynasty than democracy

[A] superb doorstep of a book, that weaves real-life characters and events with fictional ones in a clever, believable spy thriller

[An] audacious geopolitical thriller

A gripping international thriller from the author of THE STAR OF THE NORTH 
 
It's 2018. A desperate, starving 18-year-old North Korean defector makes it to the US consulate in Hanoi, Vietnam. He knows only one Western name. Jenna Williams. He asks to meet her. 
 
Jenna works under an alias at the US embassy in Russia arranging university exchanges - the cover for her role as a senior intelligence officer assigned to the CIA's Moscow station. She 37 years old, a Korean-African-American. 
With Jenna's help, Woo-jin, known as 'Books', receives the asylum and US citizenship granted to all North Korean defectors. He speaks Russian and English well, so at Jenna's suggestion he starts to study at the American School in Moscow so that she can help him acclimatise to the world outside North Korea. 
 
But while watching a television news conference on the eve of a summit in Singapore, Books is shocked to discover he recognises one of the the president's aides, Eric Rahn. He was a fellow cadet of the Mangyongdae Revolutionary School in North Korea. 
 
Jenna requests an urgent face-to-face meeting with the CIA director to warn him that the White House has been infiltrated. But with North Korean killers closing in, Jenna must get out of Russia fast. At the same time in Singapore, as the historic meeting with the North Korean leader is about to begin, Eric Rahn has the President's ear, and urges him to make a secret promise that will have fateful consequences...

D. B. John

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Extract: Star of the North by D.B. John

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