The Amateur at Arms, the first novel in The Passage to Ballantine trilogy, introduces Thomas Ballantine, a Royal Navy lieutenant and reluctant outsider drawn into Britain’s secret war during the darkest years of the Second World War. After a disastrous SOE operation in Japanese-occupied Hong Kong threatens to end his clandestine career, Ballantine returns to London disgraced and relegated to the margins of Baker Street. Scottish-born, ambitious, and uncomfortable among the privileged scions who dominate Britain’s intelligence establishment, he is nevertheless given another chance. Ballantine proves himself during a sabotage mission in occupied Norway, where courage, ingenuity, and a disturbing capacity for violence reveal that the failed amateur may possess exactly the qualities required for a very different kind of war.

Ballantine’s growing reputation carries him from a highly secret assignment in wartime New York to the casinos, black markets, Resistance networks, and dangerous divided loyalties of southern France as the Allies prepare to invade Europe. Working alongside the flamboyant French operative, Dominic, while simultaneously answering to competing branches of British intelligence, Thomas discovers that espionage demands more than deception of the enemy: sometimes survival requires deceiving one’s allies and friends as well. Against the backdrop of the approaching D-Day landings, The Amateur at Arms combines historical events with clandestine intrigue, sabotage, assassination, gambling, betrayal, and moral compromise to chart the making of an intelligence operative. It is ultimately the story of a man who longs to enter the gentlemanly world that has always excluded him, even as the secret war transforms him into precisely the kind of man that world needs—but may never be willing to accept.