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by Ted Allbeury
Written by the bestselling author of The Crossing and Pay Any Price, this remarkably plausible thriller offers a heady mix of political intrigue and intense suspense — with the very future of America and the free world hanging in the balance.
It's 1980 and the Cold War continues to rage. Seemingly out of nowhere, wealthy businessman Logan Powell has become President-elect and is only weeks away from assuming the most powerful position in the world on the twentieth day of January. Across the Atlantic, veteran British intelligence agent James MacKay uncovers shocking evidence that suggests something might be terribly wrong with the election. With the help of a reluctant CIA, MacKay sets out on a dangerous and daring mission to discover if the unthinkable has occurred: is President-elect Powell actually a puppet of the Soviet Union?
A bestseller in 1980 The Twentieth Day of January (aka Cold Tactics) has been republished in 2017 having received major media attention since it deals with many of the controversies surrounding the 2016 election.
"Allbeury, like le Carré, is a master of the genre, and this novel represents some of his best work." - Booklist
"Allbeury's novels have won a reputation not only for verisimilitude but for crisp, economical narration and high drama … there's no better craftsman." - Chicago Sun-Times
"A most knowledgeable chronicler of espionage." - The New York Times Book Review
"When I say Ted Allbeury knows where the bodies are buried I mean it literally. Truly a classic writer of espionage fiction." - Len Deighton, author of The Ipcress File
This information about The Twentieth Day of January was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Ted Allbeury (1917–2005) was an intelligence officer with Great Britain's Special Operations Executive during World War II; afterward, he ran agents between East and West Germany. Allbeury's firsthand Cold War experiences enliven his espionage novels, and he was praised by the New York Times Book Review as "a most knowledgeable chronicler of espionage" and by Booklist as "a master of the genre."
Allbeury has been compared to John le Carré, Brad Thor, and Frederick Forsyth. The movie Blue Ice with Michael Caine was based on his characters, and his book No Place to Hide was adapted as Hostage starring Sam Neill. BBC Radio 4 has adapted his novels The Other Side of Silence, Pay Any Price, No Place to Hide, The Lonely Margins, and Deep Purple for radio broadcast. Allbeury is the author of over 40 books — many under the pen name of Patrick Kelly and Richard Butler — including A Choice of Enemies, Snowball, The Judas Factor, The Seeds of Treason, and Shadow of a Doubt.
Despite being written decades ago, his bestselling book The Twentieth Day of January has received major media attention since it deals with many of the controversies surrounding the 2016 election.
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