He was educated at Ludgrove School (1979–1984), Eton College (1985–1989) and the University of Edinburgh (1990–1994), where he earned a first class honours degree in English Literature.
The novel's hero, Alec Milius, is a flawed loner in his early 20s who is instructed by MI5 to sell doctored research data on oil exploration in the Caspian Sea to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
[1] His second novel, The Hidden Man (2003), tells the story of two brothers investigating the murder of their father, a former SIS officer, at the hands of the Russian mafia.
[citation needed] Typhoon, published in the UK in 2008, is a political thriller about a CIA plot to destabilise China on the eve of the Beijing Olympics.
The novelist William Boyd described Typhoon as "a wholly compelling and sophisticated spy novel – vivid and disturbing – immaculately researched and full of harrowing contemporary relevance."
A Foreign Country was named the first Scottish Crime Book of the Year at the inaugural Bloody Scotland Festival in Stirling in September 2012.
Released in the United States as The Moroccan Girl, it tells the story of a writer who agrees to spy for MI6 while attending a literary festival in Morocco.
The protagonist, Lachlan Kite, is recruited into a top secret UK and US intelligence network while attending Alford, a fictional public school modelled on Eton College.
He is one of the trustees of The Pierce Loughran Memorial Scholarship fund, which provides tuition fees for the Yeats Summer School in Sligo, Ireland.