Silver Dagger Book Tours: False Connections Book Tour & Giveaway – 7/1 to 7/22

February. Freezing. Snow everywhere. A surveillance stint in Oswestry. At least, it was supposed to be surveillance. Well, surveillance and persuasion. Piece of piss job, frankly, and as it was just Liam and me, holed up in a cottage for an unspecified time, I’d looked forward to it. We didn’t often get to work together so when we did it was a bonus. We’d been a pair for nine months, engaged for two. Secretly engaged, that is, certainly as far as the service went. Married couples were absolutely not allowed – there was an idea it could lead to agents being compromised – but they were realistic enough to understand they could do little about more casual hook-ups: everyone knew that being in a relationship with someone not in the service was fraught with difficulties.

So, the only people who knew about the engagement were my parents, enjoying their retirement on the Gold Coast in Australia – Liam’s were both dead, killed in a car crash when he was a teenager – and our immediate boss, Catherine Spencer, a splendid old battle-axe with a heart of gold. Catherine was probably in the wrong job. She was far too concerned with the mental wellbeing of her charges, who she tended to treat as though they were the family she no longer had. Unlike Sarah Brook, she’d not been a field agent so hadn’t had her softer, more human edges knocked off her. I loved her to bits.

                Anyway, as I say, it was a simple enough job. Keep an eye on two young Russian dissidents, a married couple with the assumed names of Grigori and Polina Mironov. They were journalists in Moscow who had caught the eye of the Kremlin in the sort of way that was likely to end very badly very quickly, so they’d been spirited out via Estonia and brought to Birmingham. MI5 had no real thoughts that the Mironovs could be of any great help after their initial debrief; I genuinely think the overriding plan was to keep them safe. Good guys one, bad guys nil sort of thing. Not that the service was expecting the Russians to bother sending assassins to Birmingham to knock them off; it’s not as touristy as Salisbury for one thing. So the watching brief I had on the Mironovs was near the bottom of my extensive list of responsibilities.

                Until it wasn’t.

                Completely unexpectedly, after two years in Birmingham, Grigori and Polina upped sticks and moved sixty-five miles west to Oswestry, about as close to the Welsh border you can get without being a sheep. No one knew why. They certainly didn’t tell their local handler. Five weren’t keen on that. Black mark for the handler and a blacker one for his supervisor: me. It’s a lot easier for a couple of Russians to stay under the radar in Brum, surrounded by a million ethnically diverse people, than it is in a small rural town like Oswestry. No matter how fluent their English was, Grigori and Polina would soon become the subject of gossip and MI5 is distinctly anti-gossip.

                So that’s when Liam and I got involved. It was my job anyway and Catherine Spencer, told to send someone after them, watch them, befriend them, try and find out why they’d disappeared into the back of beyond, keep them safe and, one way or another, persuade them back to civilisation, decided that Liam should go too. If the friendly approach didn’t work and we had to do it forcibly, I’d find it difficult by myself. Liam riding shotgun was fine by me as Catherine well knew, although I didn’t think force would be needed. We were both good at striking up random friendships and we were a similar age to Grigori and Polina. Two young couples both new to the town. Nothing could be easier. So we were given fake jobs, installed in a small house around the corner from the Mironovs’ rented flat and told to get on with it.

                To start with it was straightforward. First of all, I arranged to bump into Polina in the local Co-op. She was thin, pale, drawn, with washed-out blonde hair tied back in a loose ponytail. Obviously struggling to find a particular item on the shelves. Black tea, it turned out. I helped her look but it was a small store and we had to settle for Earl Grey. That got a conversation going. As we were both new to the town, I invited her and her husband to join us for a drink in the pub. Two pairs of outsiders united against the Welsh, of whom there were many. She laughed. The first warning sign was that they’d reverted to their real names, Marat and Natalya Panarin, which only added to Five’s concern. It was the first indication that the job might not be as uncomplicated as Liam and I had expected.

                It didn’t take long for things to go wrong. Badly wrong.

Steve Sheppard was born and grew up in Surrey before moving to Buckinghamshire and then to Oxfordshire, where he spent a quarter of a century living in an idiosyncratic village that was the affectionate inspiration for his fourth book, Lazytown. He now lives in Hampshire. He spent forty years starting to write books but not finishing them, until belatedly realising that the key is not to give up. The other thing he has since learned is that he should have become a celebrity before writing a book, as this would have made selling it much easier. 

 False Connections is Steve’s fifth book, but the first one written as a straight thriller and not primarily as a comedy, although it does contain humour. He hopes it will be the first of a series featuring feisty, funny but flawed ex-MI5 agent, Mel Milano. He also has three spy thrillers with laughs to his name, all published by Claret Press: A Very Important Teapot (2019), set in Australia, Bored to Death in the Baltics (2021), not set in Australia, and Poor Table Manners (2024), which takes place in Cape Town.  These feature an initially fairly hapless hero, Dawson, and a considerably less hapless heroine, Lucy, together with varied supporting casts, most of whom are not who they claim to be. Steve’s fourth book is an out-and-out comedy-murder-mystery, Lazytown (2025).

  

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