The Gdańsk Gambit

A bank compliance officer is dead in Portland. The suicide note is in Polish.

When FBI agent Charlie Kaplan opens the file on Spencer Curry's apparent suicide, nothing adds up. A quiet man with a quiet career - except for encrypted files that shouldn't exist, a cipher book written in a language he supposedly never spoke, and financial patterns that look less like personal banking and more like an extraction plan built over decades.

Curry's daughter Rebecca, a journalist, refuses to let her father's secrets stay buried. Together, she and Charlie follow the trail from Portland to Gdańsk, where the 1981 Solidarity uprising left scars that haven't healed - and where an FSB analyst named Natasha Koroleva holds fragments of a truth that powerful interests on both sides of the old divide would kill to keep hidden.

The deeper Charlie digs, the clearer it becomes: Spencer Curry wasn't hiding from his past. He was protecting something inside it. And the people who buried it forty years ago are still watching.

The Gdańsk Gambit is the first novel in the Cold Meridian series - literary espionage fiction in the tradition of le Carré, where the real danger isn't the gun but the file, and the hardest betrayal is the one committed in the name of loyalty.

For readers of John le Carré, Mick Herron, Charles Cumming, Alan Furst, and Paul Vidich.