Richard Osborn was born and raised in England, and educated at King's School, Canterbury. He is a veteran of the British Army Royal Artillery and the United States Air Force. He is a graduate of California State University at Los Angeles and of the Thunderbird Graduate School of International Management. In civilian life, he worked at General Dynamics, Aeronutronic Ford, Hughes Aircraft and Tektronix. He is a licensed pilot and has travelled in Asia, Europe and Africa for his company.. Now he is writing fiction and non-fiction in Knoxville, Tennessee. Barbara Osborn was born and raised in Virginia. She attended art classes at the University of Georgia and studied art history at the University of Tennessee. She has travelled extensively in Europe and the Mediterranean. After living in England for awhile, she came back to Knoxville, Tennessee remarried and retired. Currently, she and her husband are co-writing fiction novels.

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British Army intelligence officer Ian Black finds himself in Berlin, just as it is heating up during the Cold War, in the latest historical military thriller from bestselling authors Richard and Barbara Osborn. For the past few years, Lieutenant Ian Black has plied his trade during the Cyprus Emergency of the 1950's. Now, in Berlin, he is almost trapped in the communist part of the city, with a female acquaintance, when the Berlin Wall is suddenly erected by the East Germans, on a Sunday morning. After hearing from a dying man on the U-Bahn that there is a traitor somewhere in the West, Ian comes up with an ingenious plan to catch a mole and a swallow lurking in a West Berlin organization. He saves a Czechoslovakian ice skater from the Czech secret service as they are trying to drag her back to Eastern Europe. He enters the devil's labyrinth to negotiate a prisoner swap with the Stasi, the East German secret police, which includes the swallow and a British engineer. Lieutenant Black has learned his trade well and is applying the skills he has developed in almost every situation he comes across. The Osborns mix military facts and Cold War politics, in a way that thrills the readers and makes the novel come alive with realistic historical events.