Sleeping Partners

It is the summer of 1996. The Cold War is supposedly over. But in a sleepy English village the local doctor is about to stumble across a dark secret that has been buried for over twenty years…

“They say that there is a book in all of us. Well this one certainly had to get out and onto the page!” says author Alan Goodare of his first novel, Sleeping Partners. “The atmosphere of the books of John LeCarre were definitely the inspiration for Sleeping Partners, but there is a lot of my personal journey in the book, wrapped up in a fictional plot of course! Once I began writing I found that the characters came to life and they were then the motivation to finish the book – I wanted to know what happened to them in the end,” adds Alan.

The story follows Teddy Burton, who is facing a mid-life crisis. He questions his own professional ability and his wife’s fidelity, setting out on a trail of discovery that leads to a midnight rendezvous on the streets of Cambridge with the mysterious Mr. Pritchard, who reveals a truth far stranger than anything he could have imagined. As the doctor’s life begins to unravel around him, he becomes increasingly drawn into a dangerous world of intrigue, spies and the ultimate betrayal, at the centre of which sits the menacing figure of the man known as ‘Victor’. Having found that his past is built on sand, what does the future hold for the quiet, unassuming doctor, now that he knows too much?

Sleeping Partners is not only a story about espionage, but it also shows one man’s descent from loving husband and respected professional, living a comfortable and unremarkable life, into a strange and frightening world in which he encounters deceit and betrayal. It is the tragedy of this personal journey that sets Sleeping Partners apart from other books of this genre and which broadens its appeal to a wider reading audience.