Brian Freemantle is an author and journalist who was twice approached to be a KGB spy, survived a machine gun ambush in Vietnam - from where he saved the lives of 100 orphans days before Saigon fell to North Vietnamese communist forces - and escaped a murder contract taken out by a Colombian drugs lord.
He's published 96 books, 18 of them featuring his internationally acclaimed anti-hero Charlie Muffin: Red Star Falling, published in June 2013, completes the trilogy Red Star Rising, Red Star Burning and Red Star Falling. The first eponymously entitled CHARLIE MUFFIN was adapted for international television and film distribution and issued on DVD in 2010 as one of the iconic movies of the 1980s.
In 1986 he was nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe award by the Mystery Writers of America.
And the judgement of the Washington Post was 'Impossible to put down, marvellous: real genius.