Shortly before the Iraq War John Le Carré revealed that the model for his famous fictional spymaster George Smiley was none other than his friend and mentor the author and MI5 officer John Bingham, the 7th Baron Clanmorris, and the author seventeen remarkable and original psychological thrillers. A Fragment of Fear was one of the works of this novelist who is described in the foreword to this book by Le Carré himself as the work of 'an extremely gifted and perhaps under-regarded British crime novelist', that of a thriller writer whose books transcend the genre, exploring the emotions behind the darkest human behaviour. John Bingham had a deep understanding of the human psyche, a comprehension demonstrated brilliantly in his seventeen novels, and A Fragment of Fear demonstrates the uniqueness of this writer's particular gift.