The Lost Key
Description
James O'Neill left the regiment with his life and not much else. He was done with the work, the weight, and the particular kind of silence that follows decisions made in the dark.
Then a call comes from the one person he cannot ignore.
The job is in Belfast. A Russian network. Encrypted drives carrying intelligence that could reach into the heart of the British government. Get in, get the drives, get out. Sarah Sterling is running it from Thames House, and she is the best in the room.
What neither of them knows is that the man on the other side has already seen them coming.
Orlov does not improvise. He does not react. He plants, he waits, and he thinks in decades while everyone else thinks in days. The Belfast operation is not something he is trying to stop.
It is something he built.
Taut, cold, and surgically precise, The Lost Key follows one operation from the wet streets of Belfast to the floor of the Atlantic. For readers who want a thriller that respects their intelligence.
More details
Person
Before fiction, James O'Neill spent close to two decades in UK Special Forces and high-risk security work ? operating across Europe, the United States and the Middle East in environments where the official version rarely matched what actually happened on the ground.
Those years fixed his interest on how surveillance works in practice, how operations fail in silence, and how decisions made in closed rooms alter lives far from any camera.
His debut novel, The Lost Key, opens a series of British espionage thrillers built on real tradecraft, modern geopolitics, and the blurred edge where cyber and human intelligence meet. Book two, The Grey Wind, continues the story of ex-SAS operator James O'Neill and MI5 officer Sarah Sterling as quiet pressure builds across the UK and Europe.
Away from the keyboard he continues to work internationally in security, risk and critical infrastructure. He divides his time between the United Kingdom and airport departure lounges ? usually with a notebook in hand and the next operation already forming in his head.
