ABOUT ALEX

Alex was formerly a CEO of two community based third sector social care organisations in Glasgow. He also spent many years working in the addiction services in the city and has just recently retired. Despite this he still provides a consultancy on social care and community based issues.

Alex’s main interest is writing, and he has had several non-fiction pieces published in newspapers and journals which have been related to his work and career.

Alex published his first novel Deception Road which is a political thriller set in Glasgow last year. It is available on Amazon. Deception Road is the first of a four-part projected quartet of novels centred on the career of MI5 officer, Eddie Macintyre. The second novel in the quartet, Caledonia Snack, will be released this year. The third and fourth novels in the series, Holy Loch and Enchantment and Conspiracy will be published within the next year.

Each book focuses on particular operations which Eddie has been involved in over the past thirty years. Deception Road is set in the present day while Caledonia Smack is set in the early 1990s and centres on drugs, gun, spooks and Irish paramilitaries in Glasgow. Holy Loch is about a Soviet spy ring at the old US nuclear submarine base in Scotland at the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s and finally Enchantment and Conspiracy is set against the background of Eddie being recruited to act as an informer for MI5 on the far left in Glasgow in the late 70s before he became an actual agent for them. Essentially, the quartet is a biography of Eddie based on a few key episodes of his life in the secret world.

Alex also writes a regular blog and various other pieces, mostly but exclusively about the world of intelligence and its impact on all of us which he will be posting regularly on the website.

Alex has a wide range of interests including reading, obviously espionage novels, but he also enjoys history, popular science and books on contemporary politics. He is a keen music fan with a wide-ranging and eclectic taste including jazz, soul, dance, prog rock, punk rock, psychedelic rock and easy listening. He also enjoys walking and dining out. He lives, writes and socialises in Glasgow, a city which is not only his home but which he regards as a “dynamic, vibrant place to write in and about.”

BOOKS

DECEPTION ROAD

Deception Road available now in Amazon Top MI5 agent Eddie Macintyre and his team are tailing a terrorist cell in Glasgow when a van carrying al-Qaeda activists on a dummy-run explodes in the city-centre, causing mass casualties. Hours earlier Eddie’s team had confirmed the van as being explosives free. Now he faces the terrifying possibility that his team’s surveillance operation has been sabotaged via an al-Qaeda infiltrated mole. But suspicion quickly fastens onto Eddie and he is catapulted down a nightmare road of treachery and deception, and Eddie must use all his experience and resources to survive. BUY NOW

CALEDONIA SMACK

Caledonia Smack book coming sooin A Police and MI5 raid on a flat in Glasgow led by MI5 officer, Eddie McIntyre, intended to capture a senior IRA commander meeting with a Glasgow drug gang leader, finds instead seven people dead from heroin overdoses. Against the background of the developing Northern Irish peace process in the early 1990s, an MI5 plot to entrap the IRA with a vicious Glasgow drugs gang leads to gang warfare, overdoses and Eddie’s efforts to extricate himself from the chaos that is unleashed.
   

Reviews

What readers from Amazon are saying
A strong plot, anchored in convincing political, psychological and technical detail. Don't know if Meikle is ex-Secret Service - but it all rings true!

This is gripping stuff – an engaging story very well told. It could be made into an excellent film. The action is exciting and the scenarios are inventive and interesting. I look forward to reading more from this exciting new novelist.

This is gripping stuff – an engaging story very well told. It could be made into an excellent film. The action is exciting and the scenarios are inventive and interesting. I look forward to reading more from this exciting new novelist.

LATEST FROM ALEX

WHAT’S WRONG WITH HARM REDUCTION FOR SMOKERS?

Over the past thirty years Scotland, along with the rest of the UK, has adopted the policy and practice of harm reduction for people with addictions. Though controversial, the philosophy behind it is simple: people are strongly addicted, physically and psychologically, to a range of substances such as alcohol and ...
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THE FOLLY OF LIBERAL INTERVENTIONISM

Following the end of the Cold War, Western countries, primarily the US and Britain, embarked on a series of interventions in overseas conflicts that seemed to yield quick results in terms of an end to fighting and an apparently sustainable peace. This began with the response to Saddam’s Hussein’s invasion ...
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FAITH, CERTAINTY & TERROR

The recent attacks on Paris and now San Bernardino have, rightly, focused on the sheer barbarity of the assaults. These atrocities were deliberately intended to cause as much wanton loss of life as possible. Such callous targeting of innocent people defies most people’s comprehension. Surely these people must be psychopaths ...
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JFK, FAITH AND CONSPIRACY

Vincent Bugilosi’s monumental book on the Kennedy assassination Reclaiming History* is a rigorous dissection of the events and circumstances surrounding the JFK shooting, and at over 1600 pages, vigorously rebuts the numerous conspiracies that have attended the brutal slaying in Dallas in 1963. Two examples. Firstly, Bugilosi presents a clinical ...
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THE DOWNFALL OF MANAGERIALISM

The framework within which policy-makers and decision makers have been operating over the past decades in Britain and most Western countries has been dominated by ‘managerialism’. This is a focus on the best way of managing and implementing policies in the socio-economic and political spheres which transcend, indeed almost dismiss, ...
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THE ROYAL WEDDING: MONTHS OF GUSHING SYCOPHANCY AHEAD

Prince William and Kate Middleton appear to be a personable, attractive young couple, and as with the news of anyone’s wedding, no reasonable person can wish them anything but health and happiness for the future. The problem is, that unless you’re closeted on Mars or sequestered in some isolated Buddhist ...
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