The English Spy is the fourth Gabriel Allon adventure to feature the don’s best assassin: former SAS commando Christopher Keller. The novel ends in the place where Keller’s story began, in the dangerous green hills of South Armagh. During the worst of the long and bloody war for Northern Ireland, the region truly was the most dangerous place in the world to wear the uniform of a soldier or police officer. The largest single loss of life occurred on August 27, 1979, when two large roadside bombs killed eighteen British soldiers at Warrenpoint. The attack occurred just hours after Lord Mountbatten, a British statesman and relative of Queen Elizabeth II, was killed by an IRA bomb concealed aboard his fishing boat—an incident that suggested the opening passages of The English Spy. Clearly, I borrowed much from the life of Diana, Princess of Wales, when constructing my fictitious princess, but in no way was it my intention to suggest Diana’s death was a murder. She died in a Paris tunnel because an intoxicated man was behind the wheel of her car, not as a result of an international conspiracy.

The Republic of Ireland’s long struggle against illegal narcotics has been well documented. Less well known, however, is the role played in the drug trade by elements of the Real IRA, the dissident republican terrorist group formed in 1997. The organization, which included several members of the IRA’s South Armagh Brigade, carried out a series of devastating bombings in the spring and summer of 1998, as Northern Ireland was moving tentatively toward peace. The deadliest was the bombing of the market town of Omagh on August 15 that killed twenty-nine people and left more than two hundred others wounded. Specific details of the attack that appear in the novel are accurate, though I granted myself license when portraying the actions of my fictitious British spymaster, Graham Seymour. Eamon Quinn and Liam Walsh were not in the bomb car that day, as they are inventions of the author.