The City Underground

Ireland 1941. A German spy escapes from Mountjoy Prison into a network of IRA safe houses, with an ease that convinces the head of the Garda Special Branch he had help from Irish Military Intelligence. The spy is protected not just by the IRA but by the people who are meant to catch him. Special Branch has been told to stay out of it. Not their business. But Stefan Gillespie's boss sends him to investigate anyway. Stefan is thrown together with an unreliable, bitter, alcoholic private detective and a woman IRA courier who hates everything Stefan and the Irish police stand for. And this web of deceit and betrayal is only beginning. Tracing the spy starts with an IRA plot to attack British interests in Ireland and ends with Stefan forced to save the IRA Chief of Staff from IRA men in Northern Ireland, who see him as a traitor. Taken across the border into war-torn Northern Ireland, Stefan finds himself alone, abandoned by Special Branch in Dublin, hunted by the IRA as a spy, and by the Ulster Constabulary as a policeman who has gone rogue.