Rising Tide

Name: Rising Tide
Rating: 4 (53 reviews)

by Alan Bardos Book 1 in the Daniel Nichols Spy Thrillers series.

First published 2023

Amazon

3.8(53)

November 1940. Fleet Air Arm pilot Lieutenant Daniel Nichols is wounded during the Royal Navy’s carrier strike on the Italian fleet at Taranto. Six months later British double agent Sándor Braun learns that a Japanese delegation studying the raid may be preparing a similar operation elsewhere. Grounded from flying and transferred into the Naval Intelligence Division, Nichols persuades his superior, Ian Fleming, to let him pose as a disaffected airman with information to sell to German and Japanese intelligence.

The trail carries Nichols through Lisbon and the United States as he becomes convinced that the target is Pearl Harbor. His attempt to turn fragmentary intelligence into a warning places a fictional spy story inside the real sequence linking Taranto, Japanese naval planning and the attack of 7 December 1941. Bardos uses Nichols’s divided loyalties, damaged reputation and field improvisation to explore how intelligence can be collected correctly yet still fail to produce action in time.