Elixir of Time

Leon Dabrowski is a gifted nuclear scientist who has provided the world with a safe and clean form of energy. When his family is intimidated by a sinister criminal cartel, he has no option but to bow to their demands and take his immense intellectual prowess to the North Korean peninsula. There he is expected to work in a secret underground complex on the Republic’s thermonuclear weapons programme.

To make matters worse, the American CIA sees Leon’s misfortune as the perfect opportunity to uncover what the North Koreans are up to.

There are spanners to be thrown into the works, data to be smuggled . . . life and death decisions to be made. Whatever he does, Leon must steer a delicate route between placating a brutal and merciless regime, stemming the worldwide proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and securing his family’s safety.

But Leon is not only someone who can think his way around the most devious means of coercion they throw at him. His father is Russia’s richest oligarch with the most powerful private security force on the planet; his wife is a brilliant and determined academic who isn’t going to stand by and watch her family being threatened and abused by these people. The gloves are off . . .

Keith Short was born in Hartlepool in the North-east of England and educated at Durham University where he gained his BSc and PhD in physics. After spending most of his career working on technical projects within the electricity supply and nuclear industries, he retired in 2016 to become a full-time writer of fiction. His debut international thriller novel, Master of Starlight, was published in 2019.