Ken Follett · 1978 · thriller

Ken Follett's 1978 thriller. A German agent working alone in wartime Britain photographs the dummy army built to convince Hitler the invasion will come at Calais, and starts north with the film. Everything depends on stopping one man reaching a U-boat, and he is stranded by a storm on an island with a woman, her crippled husband and their son.

1. 1
   London

   Die Nadel has worked alone in England for years, killing anyone who gets close - and photographs the plywood aircraft and inflatable tanks of the phantom army assembled to point at the Pas de Calais.

2. 2
   Aberdeen

   He runs north with the film and a rendezvous arranged with a U-boat off the Scottish coast, hunted by an academic turned intelligence officer who is the only man who believes the agent exists at all.

3. 3
   Storm Island

   A gale wrecks his boat on an island with four inhabitants, and the invasion comes down to a woman with a rifle and a radio - which is why the book works, having spent two hundred pages being about armies.