This is book 19 of the "David Audley" series.

This note contains spoilers for the book.

I've also got a general page on Anthony Price.

The last one. Well, Price is still alive so far as I know; but he hasn't published any fiction since this book, in 1989. That seems to suggest he's retired.

It's not at all a bad note to go out on. Quite an adventure, in Berlin and Capri and England, with Audley eventually talking their way out of the midst of a Spetsnaz unit operating in Hereford -- which is busily removing the weapons, including nerve gas, that they had cached for use in a war. Lukianov was probably intending to sell this stuff to terrorist groups, after removing the information on it from the computers (and removing his associates, too).

Peter Richardson noted a Spetsnaz entrenching tool ("little spade") at the scene of an auto wreck years ago, before he left R&D. He was seen seeing, and this resulted eventually in the death of his mother (faked to look like suicide), and Kulik and a British intelligence man in Berlin, and two Arabs on Capri. The Russians were hell-bent to get the arms out before Lukianov could get to it -- they wanted to avoid a scandal. The British wanted to avoid a scandal. Everybody wanted to avoid a scandal. So Peter Richardson never gets his revenge.

It introduces a new character that I'd rather expect to see more of -- Mary Franklin. But I guess not.