A Sunday Times Best Book of 2018

Agent. Prisoner. Target.
Who is Sergei Skripal?

4 March 2018, Salisbury, England.
A man and his daughter are found slumped on a bench, poisoned by the deadly nerve agent Novichok. He was a Russian national who became an MI6 spy.

Russia are publicly accused of carrying out the attack by the British government, sparking a diplomatic crisis between Russia and the West.

Then two innocent people find a discarded perfume bottle used in the attack and one of them, Dawn Sturgess, tragically dies. It is now a murder investigation. How exactly did we get here?

Based on interviews with Sergei before his poisoning, Mark Urban explains the most shocking espionage incident in a decade. In The Skripal Files he describes precisely how an otherwise loyal Russian intelligence officer was turned into an agent by MI6, how Skripal was betrayed so that he found himself in a Siberian prison, and why, years later, he was targeted for assassination.

'An account that reads as if it were ripped from a Cold War spy novel' TIME

'Other books will follow on the Skripals, but they will struggle to match the texture of Urban's research, its knowledgeable hinterland' The Times