Kuwait 1960. With Soviet backing neighbouring Iraq plans to invade. Expat Gordon Carlisle has little to worry about other than when to next don his dinner jacket. Following contact by an MI6 agent everything changes. Even marriage to his beautiful wife Anita breaks down as he becomes a suspect in a chain of deaths in the Protectorate. Only after he meets visiting author Ian Fleming does he fully understand the complex web of betrayal and murder at work as Iraq assembles its forces.

Known for her use of personal experience to write behind the scenes, Louise draws on her Kuwaiti birth and early upbringing in the oil rich State to write her new spy thriller Our Man In Kuwait.

The plot was inspired by certain incidents that took place during 1960 when the expat community was living under threat of invasion by neighbouring Iraq. That same year author and Naval Intelligence freelancer Ian Fleming visited the country and closely befriended her father Ian Byres, the Preventative Health Officer for Kuwait Oil Company. Louise was seven. She remembers vividly the men’s shared interest in her father’s personal zoo and the ensuing contest between a viper and scorpion on their lounge carpet. The two “Ian”s then went out on one of her father’s hawking expeditions into the desert which features in the story.

Other elements of which she became aware, such as the British double-agent Kim Philby’s tour of the Gulf States prior to his defection to the Soviet Union in 1963, helped shape some of the other major characters,

Louise’s Kuwaiti experience and research features in her earlier books. In The Missing Activist, a private investigator goes undercover to learn about Jihadi brides and the sequel The Killing of the Cherrywood MP sees her tackling the counter reaction to Islamic extremism by the Far Right. In The Secret War she probes links between the Chinese Communist Party and UK universities. Louise has also TV thrillers for the Lifetime TV network.