The Runner

'Thought-provoking, high-octane chase thriller with style' - Financial Times

'Leather once again delivers high-octane thrill-a-minute action that reads like a pitch for a Netflix series' - Irish Independent

The explosive new stand-alone thriller from the author of the Spider Shepherd series

Sally Page is an MI5 'footie', a junior Secret Service Agent who maintains 'legends': fake identities or footprints used by real spies. Her day consists of maintaining flats and houses where the legends allegedly live, doing online shopping, using payment, loyalty and travel cards and going on social media in their names - anything to give the impression to hostile surveillance that the legends are living, breathing individuals.

One day she goes out for coffee leaving the safe house from which she and her fellow footies operate. When she comes back they have all been murdered and she barely escapes with her own life. She is on the run: but from whom she has no idea. Worse, her bosses at MI5 seem powerless to help her. To live, she will have to use all the lies and false identities she has so carefully created while discovering the truth . . .

“entertains and whisks the reader along at a breath-taking pace”

Praise for THE RUNNER - :

Thought-provoking, high-octane chase thriller with style - Financial Times

- Shots Magazine

Leather once again delivers high-octane thrill-a-minute action that reads like a pitch for a Netflix series - Irish Independent

The conclusion is as high-powered and explosive as I've come to expect from Leather, and this is another compelling military-grade thriller with characters both old and new - Crime Review

Praise for bestselling author Stephen Leather - :

As tough as British thrillers get . . . gripping - Irish Independent

The sheer impetus of his storytelling is damned hard to resist - Sunday Express

Stephen Leather is one of the UK's most successful thriller writers, an ebook and Sunday Times bestseller and author of the critically acclaimed Dan 'Spider' Shepherd series and the Jack Nightingale supernatural detective novels. Before becoming a novelist he was a journalist for more than ten years on newspapers such as The Times, the Daily Mirror, the Glasgow Herald, the Daily Mail and the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. He is one of the country's most successful ebook authors and his titles have topped the Amazon Kindle charts in the UK and the US. His bestsellers have been translated into fifteen languages and he has also written for television.

You can learn more from Stephen's website, , and find him on Facebook at

Stephen also has a website for his Spider Shepherd series, , and for his Jack Nightingale series,

' Thought-provoking, high-octane chase thriller with style' - Financial Times ' Leather once again delivers high-octane thrill-a-minute action that reads like a pitch for a Netflix series' - Irish Independent The explosive new stand-alone thriller from the author of the Spider Shepherd series Sally Page is an MI5 'footie', a junior Secret Service Agent who maintains 'legends': fake identities or footprints used by real spies. Her day consists of maintaining flats and houses where the legends allegedly live, doing online shopping, using payment, loyalty and travel cards and going on social media in their names - anything to give the impression to hostile surveillance that the legends are living, breathing individuals.One day she goes out for coffee leaving the safe house from which she and her fellow footies operate. When she comes back they have all been murdered and she barely escapes with her own life. She is on the run: but from whom she has no idea. Worse, her bosses at MI5 seem powerless to help her. To live, she will have to use all the lies and false identities she has so carefully created while discovering the truth . . .

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