It's Quiller's most dangerous mission yet, and is also his last for the British intelligence agency so secret that it has no name. No matter that its orders originate at the Prime Minister level; if detected, it would be denied at that and every other level of the government. Quiller's orders this time take the pseudonymous operative to post-Cold War Russia to infiltrate the powerful and omnipresent mafiya that controls every sector and ruble of the country's fragile economy. More ruthless than the Sicilian brotherhood and as conscienceless as the Colombian drug cartels, the mafiya owns top politicians, judges, generals, bankers, and the police. Those it doesn't own it can buy, and those it doesn't choose to buy, it eliminates. Chief among the lawless mafiya lords stands a criminally brilliant British national, whom the agency wants taken out of play. Quiller learns that the one man who can help him achieve his goal is impounded in Gulank, the most infamous of all the gulags. Quiller must sneak his way into Gulank, and from a gulag that no prisoner has ever escaped, rescue the only person who can save his last, internationally vital mission.

In Miami, on the waterfront, a long-time agent has been turned. Quiller gets the call to find out why. It looks like a simple job.But with Quiller, nothing is ever simple. That's because he digs. He finds a gigantic conspiracy, one of global importance, with nothing less than the future of the White House at stake!"Tense, intelligent, harsh, surprising." (The New York Times)

Quiller, one of the last and best of espionage fiction's secret agents to have prowled the Cold War back alleys over the past quarter century, will thrill fans again with this, his 16th adventure. When a fellow agent who has called upon him for protection is murdered before his eyes, an enraged and embarrassed Quiller pressures his superiors into giving him the dead man's assignment to investigate the murder of a British cultural attache in Berlin. The murder is apparently tied to former East German national Dieter Klaus, a madman who wants to gain attention for his terrorist splinter group. Accompanied by the attache's oddly subservient widow, Quiller goes to Berlin and soon manages to infiltrate Klaus's inner circle. There he is met with an extraordinary surprise, especially startling to the reader for the almost offhand way in which it is presented (something of a Hall trademark). Klaus's plan is not fully revealed until the end, when Quiller must take a final, almost certainly suicidal step to save the day. This is a smashing entry in an always entertaining series.

This well-drawn tale of espionage is set in West Berlin, 15 years after the end of WW II. Quiller, a British agent who works without gun, cover or contacts, takes on a neo-Nazi underground organization and its war criminal leader. In the process, he discovers a complex and malevolent plot, more dangerous to the world than any crime committed during the war.On its publication in 1966, THE QUILLER MEMORANDUM received the Edgar Award as best mystery of the year.