Malaya, 1951. It is the Malayan Emergency and a British major, commanding a rifle company of Gurkhas, is woken in the small hours by a call from Special Branch with the six-figure grid reference of a large party of communist guerrillas. The line is poor, the army man is hung over and the location is written down incorrectly. But Dame Fortune, that ever fickle lady, also decrees that the Special Branch information is out-of-date, and the communists are some way away so that against millions of odds the two parties meet up and the guerrillas suffer their greatest loss of the Emergency.

The story of what would become the tipping point of the Malayan Emergency in favour of the security forces is retold against a background of events in Moscow, Darjeeling, Delhi and Calcutta, where senior communist party members plot to infiltrate Gurkha units and destabilise Malaya. It is up to Captain Rance of the Gurkhas and his Chinese friend, a mole in the politburo, to overturn these plots before communism gains the upper hand in a Malaya aiming for self-rule.

Operation Tipping Point is the eighth in a series of books involving Gurkha military units that may be read in any order. The author, JP Cross, a retired Gurkha colonel, old ‘jungle hand’ and counter-insurgency expert, draws on real events he witnessed during his time fighting in the Malayan Emergency.