Please join us for an author chat with local author Terry Stanton at our Wauchope Library on Friday 21st February at 11.00am.
Terry is a retired English solicitor. He specialised in litigation, retired in 2005, and moved with his wife, Christine, to Australia. Their three children had already moved here. His hobbies are writing and playing the clarinet.
“Novichok” is his third novel. The first was “Deliver me from Evil”, a fictional autobiography of Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, who became Charles 1’s most important minister. The second was “No Mayday! No Mayday!” which is a story of an airliner which disappears in exactly the same circumstances as MH370 with all the crew and passengers on board.
That book, like the new one, “Novichok”, was inspired by Terry’s cynicism regarding whatever governments tell us about almost anything.
Terry plays his clarinets in Sinfonia, the local orchestra, and in the Glenn Moore Band in Port Macquarie, where he and Christine now live. His passion is classical music, and he once took part in the North Queensland Concerto Competition; he was not victorious!
Novichok
Novichok is the deadliest nerve agent known to man. It is a Russian invention, but now many countries have it.
Equally dangerous are the activities of spies. Spying may seem brave, but it endangers the people or country against whom this secret trade is practised. As every nation is spied on to some extent, no-one is truly safe. If the spies make mistakes or foolishly expose themselves, it is dangerous for them.
They may be shot on sight, tortured, imprisoned, or executed, with or without trial. They may be turned as double agents; then they are a danger to themselves and everyone else, as no-one can be absolutely certain for whom they are working, or to whom they are loyal.
Oleg Schaplinov and his bastard son Igor were embroiled in this sort of terrifying nightmare. This extensively researched novel tells their story, and deals with all the characteristics of the spying game.