Crime, like any other business, is conducted for profit. When someone figured out a way to make a profit out of engineering prison breaks, a new crime was born. The Freedom Trap deals with a highly organized gang of scarperers whose business it is to spring selected long-term prisoners who can afford the price. It was the rapid growth and spectacular success of this latest industry that prompted Long Mountbatten’s much-publicized investigation and report. But when rumours started circulating that Slade, the notorious traitor-spy last encountered in Mr. Bagley’s Running Blind, when he was jailed for forty years, was planning his escape from a top-security wing, M.1.5 felt they could not wait for the Home Office to take its usual lumbering action. Those dangerous scarperers must be smashed at all costs. And so the bait is clearly laid along a trail which starts in London, leading to a night of fireworks in Malta by way of Ireland and Gibraltar. The Prison trap is sprung all right, but the reader is immediately trapped more securely than any of the victims by the riveting twists and turns of what is easily Desmond Bagley’s most accomplished thriller to date

An enquiry following an avalanche which destroyed a small New Zealand mining town, reveals a divided community which had ignored all danger signals. Ian Ballard, the young managing director of the mine, finds his career and even his life, depends upon his ability to clear his name. A million tons of snow and a hundred thousand tons of air were on the move, plunging down towards the mists of the valley. By the time the mist was reached, the avalanche was moving at over two hundred miles per hour. The air blast hit the mist and squirted it aside violently to reveal, only momentarily, a few buildings. A fraction of a second later, the main body of the avalanche hit the valley bottom. The white death had come to Hukahoronui

He knows that he is Giles Dennison of Hampstead, but that is the only thing he knows for sure. He wakes up one morning in an Oslo hotel and the face in the mirror is not his own. This is only the beginning of an adventure in which he is trapped, with no hope of escape