Night Heron

Adam Brookes puts his journalistic experience (as a former BBC news correspondent based in China) to good use with his first spy novel, the highly realistic Night Heron. The story involves a Chinese intellectual (Li Huasheng, nicknamed Peanut) who seeks to leverage his access to state secrets in order to find a way out of the country (with the aid of British intelligence). The story has fairly good characters and a propulsive plot, but it's the setting in China — so rare for spy novels — that makes it especially worth reading.