How to Read Triple Edge

Triple Edge is a literary espionage trilogy spanning 1989 to 2016 — the years between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Brexit referendum, when the consequences of 1989 began to be fully felt and very few people were paying the right kind of attention.

The trilogy follows Charles Keane, a Cambridge-educated British intelligence officer, Laura Pellegrino, a French-Italian DCRI operative, and the Cambridge Group — an unofficial network of analysts, field operatives, and researchers who have concluded that the intelligence establishment cannot be trusted to investigate itself. Their adversaries include the SVR’s Viktor Pavlov, the Butler Britain network around Lord Horatio Friggington, and a kompromat database known as the Silent Russian whose full contents no one person understands.

The core thesis — stated plainly at the outset and tested against every event in the series — is this: no side in this story pursued purely principled goals. There are no good boys and no bad boys. Only people making decisions under pressure, with incomplete information, in a world where the structures they believed in were already compromised.