Can ex-NSA agent Ava stop the Emperor’s war plans before he kills millions – and her?

There’s a new Cold War…and it’s about to erupt into World War Three.

Emperor Qin – absolute ruler, dictator for life – has one task before he succumbs to brain cancer, and it means war. Can ex-spy Ava stop him in time to save millions – and survive?

Qin will ‘unify’ China by ordering the conquest of Taiwan, a democratic nation of 23 million people just 100 miles off the mainland, a pledge the Chinese Communist Party has made every year since the 1949 Revolution.

But there’s a leak, a flood of state secrets.

They land in the lap of the former NSA analyst in Washington DC. Ava Shute hasn’t sought the material. On the contrary, she’s a most reluctant recipient.

One thing keeps Ava going: the prospect of a nuclear Armageddon. The clock is ticking as Chinese agents hunt Ava down with orders to kill.

Qin holds the offices of Chairman and General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. He’s so powerful he considers himself a modern-day Emperor, a view shared at least in part by those close to him. Qin has a problem, though, in the form of a brain tumor. It gives him headaches and is killing him by degrees.

While the Emperor still lives, he vows to fulfill a decades-old CCP objective: reuniting Taiwan with mainland China. This means war with Taiwan and perhaps her allies, including the United States. Qin doesn’t shrink from this possibility. He embraces it, in fact, and sets an aggressive timetable.

In Washington, D.C., Avery “Ava” Shute, a former NSA analyst, works for Cincinnatus, an online “open source intelligence” outlet, while Qin and China prepare to attack. Unexpectedly, her long-ago schoolmate, Pan, recruits her to go public with top-secret information about China’s planned aggression against Taiwan. Ava is reluctant but agrees. She soon finds herself entangled in a maze of spies and power politics. Can a mere writer prevent World War III? Can she even survive?

Emperor presents the plot along two parallel tracks. One track follows Qin as he plans his military adventures and, by the way, dispatches enemies with casual brutality. The second track gives the reader Ava’s perspective. The shift back and forth between China to America doesn’t present much of a problem. However, the chapters dealing with the American side of the story interested me more than many of the chapters focused on Qin.

It is easy for one to lose their way in the flurry of acronyms sprinkled throughout the book. My superficial knowledge of recent Chinese history made following the storyline harder than it should have been. Also, as Ava put it, the sections describing orders of battle were “dead boring.” I didn’t encounter many of these, though.

The main characters have considerable depth; they might be real people. Qin, in particular, comes across as believable. The Ava character has something enigmatic about her. The reader learns a lot about her but suspects she doesn’t reveal everything.

I won’t divulge the ending, but I found it a bit contrived. It was as if the author got to a point where he wanted to tie up the story with a bow and finish it (as a writer, I can sympathize!). Regardless, Emperor is an enjoyable book, especially if you like spy stories.

John Fullerton worked during the Cold War as a ‘contract labourer’ for Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6. As a newspaperman, freelance journalist and then Reuters correspondent, he lived or worked in 40 countries and covered a dozen wars.

The last in his Cold War spy trilogy, Spy Trap, was published in April 2022. His 10th novel, Emperor, was published in December, 2022. He’s working on another spy novel, Bloody Snow, set in the UK and post-war Germany.