Royalty Protection Team officer Robert Finlay is looking forward to a quieter life, when two police officers are killed and their links to his own past becomes clear … putting everyone's lives in danger. A startlingly authentic debut … first in a page-turning, searing new series.

**NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER**

**Shortlisted for the CWA John Creasey New Blood Dagger**

**LoveReading Debut of the Month**

'Terse, tense and vivid writing. Matt Johnson is a brilliant new name in the world of thrillers. And he's going to be a big name' Peter James

'From the first page to the last, an authentic, magnetic and completely absorbing read' Sir Ranulph Fiennes

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2001. Age is catching up with Robert Finlay, a police officer on the Royalty Protection team based in London. He's looking forward to returning to uniform policing and a less stressful life with his new family. But fate has other plans. Finlay's deeply traumatic, carefully concealed past is about to return to haunt him.

A policeman is killed by a bomb blast, and a second is gunned down in his own driveway. Both of the murdered men were former Army colleagues from Finlay's own SAS regiment, and in a series of explosive events, it becomes clear that he is not the ordinary man that his colleagues, friends and new family think he is.

And so begins a game of cat and mouse – a wicked game, in which Finlay is the target, forced to test his long-buried skills in a fight against a determined and unidentified enemy.

Wicked Game is a taut, action-packed, emotive thriller about a man who might be your neighbour, a man who is forced to confront his past in order to face a threat that may wipe out his future, a man who is willing to do anything to protect the people he loves.

But is it too late?

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'Utterly compelling and dripping with authenticity. This summer's must-read thriller' J S Law

'Out of terrible personal circumstances, Matt Johnson has written a barnstormer of a thriller. Nothing is clear-cut in a gripping labyrinthine plot, which – despite thrills and spills aplenty – never falls short of believable' David Young

'Wicked Game has the authenticity I look for in a thriller. While the plot kept me turning pages, the characters made me care. Matt writes like a man who has lived it' Kevin Maurer

'Johnson litters his tale with the plotting equivalent of incendiaries: cops we don't quite trust, a career that came abruptly to an end, a secret needing to be kept … Gripping stuff' New Welsh Review