Book excerpt: Britain: a few years from now... A new populist political party has won the recent general election. Duncan Jones, freelance political journalist and blogger, loses his weekly column at a national newspaper and turns to investigative reporting. The chance remark of a friend leads him to suspect that the Russians are directing the new British government’s policies and decisions. As he visits Moscow and Ukraine to discover more, scandal follows intrigue, dark forces attempt to silence him by whatever means possible and he turns to an unlikely ally for help. A Friend in Deed is a fast-paced political thriller set in an all-too-believable near future. It is a timely reminder of how the power of the internet can be harnessed to undermine the political and personal freedoms we take for granted. It is also the story of how one man confronts the traumas in his past and works out how to resolve them.