Book Reviews

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Anthology #16

Yesterday’s Spy, by Tom Bradby

This is another accomplished book from this well-established author; and it is not the first of his I have reviewed: the previous one, in a different series, Triple Cross, about a year ago. This one features a British agent who is relatively elderly, in espionage field work terms, Harry Tower. His experience encompasses Germany during the interwar years, Yugoslavia, and currently [1953] Iran, which is at the beginning of a tumultuous period of political change, becoming more violent & potentially deadly during Harry’s sojourn there. As the plot unfolds, we are given flashbacks to both his espionage work and his personal life, having lost a loved wife, whom he met in Göttingen in 1933, to suicide, and a son, who blames him for his mother’s sad demise. Sean, who is a foreign correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, has gone missing in Iran after submitting a potentially inflammatory story about corruption in the rapidly developing oil industry there; nobody seems particularly worried about this, so Harry resolves to investigate, unofficially. At the same time, there is suspicion at London Centre about the possibility of a Russian mole [although when wasn’t there?], and this suspicion seems to be increasingly angled Harry’s way, so he has that to contend with as well. Sean’s Iranian girlfriend seems eager to help, but can she be trusted? Especially as her father is a top military officer. Tense stuff, and clearly well researched. The paperback I read was published in 2023 by Penguin [2022, Bantam Press, an imprint of Transworld Publishers, London], ISBN 978-0-5521-7554-8.

The Bullet That Missed, by Richard Osman

This is the third novel in a series called the Thursday Murder Club mysteries, and it is a cleverly plotted story by a latterly popular, and evidently intelligent genial giant of a television presenter who is known from shows such as Richard Osman’s House of Games; he is also a regular on Have I Got News For You. The eponymous Murder Club is a regular meeting of mostly, but not all, residents of a Kent retirement home, so they could be written off as a group of old codgers who want to stave off senility by solving cold-case murders, but to do that would be very foolish, as a few criminals have previously found out to their cost. It helps that one of the members is an ex-MI6 operative, and she is not averse to using her contacts to keep things moving. This time, they are investigating the murder of a journalist, who was researching a massive VAT fraud; she appears to have died when her car went over a cliff on the south coast of England, so it is very possible that she upset one or more criminals enough to jeopardise her life, but her body was never found. Osman has a nice dry humour, and these characters, including some from the world of television, which he obviously knows well, are plausible; also, all the loose ends are satisfyingly tied up. There is a new story in the series, The Last Devil To Die, so I will keep a look out for this and the previous two. The paperback I read was published in 2023 by Penguin, part of the Penguin Random House Group of companies [2022, Viking], ISBN 978-0-2419-9238–8.

Death of a Ghost, by M.C. Beaton

The Hamish Macbeth series appears to be very successful, if the number of entrants in this canon [33 including this final one, whose titles all begin with Death of…] is any guide; or, at the very least, this author is very prolific. Before her death in 2019 [source: Wikipedia], she also wrote three books in an Agatha Raisin series, set in the Cotswolds, which has been dramatised on Sky 1 [recently restyled Sky Max], but whose blandishments I have, hitherto, managed to resist. This series was also adapted for TV with Robert Carlyle in the rôle, but Beaton was not happy with the result; here, Hamish Macbeth lives in a fictional village, Lochdubh, in the Scottish highlands, and he is a singularly unambitious sergeant in the unified Police Scotland force; his motivation for this is very simple and, possibly to many in real life, commendable: he loves his predominantly single life in this quiet little backwater, so why jeopardise it by looking for promotion? Sometimes, as, indeed, he has to in this episode, he has to think & work hard to avoid commendation, and allow the praise to fall on other officers. Here, he befriends a former police superintendent from Glasgow who has bought & taken up residence in a nearby castle, whose tower is materialising ghostly emanations; then, a body is found in the cellar, but before it can be identified, it disappears… The narrative meanders along very nicely, including some mostly intelligible dialect, and Hamish is not one to accept an easy resolution to a case, as do most of his superiors, who also underestimate his folksy intuition. Not gritty, but neither is it esoteric, so an easy read, with ends nicely tied. The hardback I read was published in 2017 by Constable, an imprint of the Little, Brown Book Group, London, ISBN 978-1-4721-1724-3.

A Double Life, by Charlotte Philby

I have to admit that before I was anywhere near the end of this doorstop of a book, I was wondering if I could sustain the interest in the story until the end. The subject matter is worthy enough—people-trafficking—but the author develops the narrative of one of the protagonists, Gabriela, very slowly, detailing her descent from low-level employee at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office in London, with occasional forays to Russia as she is fluent in the language, through redundancy because she can potentially compromise some illicit activity of her superior; glimpsed in a café in Moscow with an unknown man & woman, where she was on assignment; to a duplicitous double life, balancing a husband who knows nothing of her unemployment, and 2 children, with a relationship, including a baby daughter, with a Russian oligarch who owns a sumptuous home in London but also still has a mother back in Moscow. Interspersed with this, but on a much shorter timescale, so not co-synchronous, is the story of Isabel, a journalist who is not living her best life while working for a small local newspaper, also in London, who stumbles across the people-trafficking story after witnessing what she thought was a woman being attacked on Hampstead Heath. The two stories eventually overlap, after much stress & heartache [most of which is self-induced, it has to be said] for Gabriela, but the dénouement is not a complete resolution which, after such a long build-up, I found rather frustrating: Gabriela’s story will probably work out well, but we don’t know for sure, and Isabel’s story [in both senses] could easily go any conceivable way. Possibly unusual for the duplicity to be told from a woman’s point of view, though. The paperback I read was published in 2020, by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd., London, ISBN 978-0-0083-6518-9.

Book Review

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Judas 62, by Charles Cumming

From the strapline on the front cover of this book—“He thought the mission was over. Now Moscow has him in their [sic] sights.”—and the photo of a Lada with an obviously eastern European, possibly Russian licence plate, the reader might be tempted to assume that the 62 in the book’s title refers to the year in which the story is set. Not so: the Judas referenced is a ‘hit list’, of Russian intelligence officers, military personnel and scientists living in the West who had been targeted by Moscow for reprisal assassinations, as in the case of the real life victims Skripal & Litvinenko, to name but two. The impression is given that the author, whose name is vaguely familiar [but I am not familiar with any of his other work] knows of what he writes: in his very brief biography at the front of the book, we are tantalised with the information that “Shortly after university, he was approached for recruitment by the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), an experience that inspired his first novel, A Spy by Nature.” So is it safe to assume that he was recruited? Presumably, he could tell us, but then he’d have to kill us…… not easy, if he is anticipating a numerous readership.

This book is the second in what promises to be some sort of a series [something I seem to be making a habit of: jumping in to a series mid-way, but given the random access nature of public library usage, inevitable], the previous one of which was called BOX88. The significance of this name might have been explained in the eponymous tome, but it isn’t here, other than to impart the information that it is “a top-secret Anglo-American spy agency” which, given the protectionist mentality of both countries when it comes to sharing secret intelligence, does seem slightly implausible, but for the sake of enjoying the story, it is necessary to suspend that disbelief: it is well worth it, however. We are also expected to swallow the fact of a young student, who had not yet graduated from university, being sent into the heart of post-Soviet Russia by BOX88 in the summer of 1993, to exfiltrate a biological weapons scientist, Yuri Aranov, who wanted to defect to the West. That being the case, this story is in three parts: the fairly lengthy narrative of the exfiltration, bookended by events in the present [2020], in which COVID is affecting everything: even the London location of the BOX88 headquarters.

When the protagonist, Lachlan Kite, who is now middle aged, but by now in a senior position in BOX88, finds out that his erstwhile cover name, Peter Galvin, is on the Judas list, assigned the number 62, hence the book’s name, naturally enough, he is concerned; the question is how this could have happened, given that there is an unwritten law in espionage that intelligence agencies do not target each others’ operatives for elimination; but also, Kite is worried for the safety of his erstwhile girlfriend, from whom he is now estranged, but who played a significant part in his covert operation in Russia in 1993. A sting operation is decided upon, to be played out in Dubai, but using better backup facilities than Kite was able to call upon previously. This is a substantial book, of nearly 500 pages, and although the infrastructure of BOX88 is not in the le Carré mould, the plotting & the characters are as believable as he might have used, so this is definitely a book which, for me, easily held my attention all the way through, and the possibility of a further story in the series is implied at the end, so I will certainly look out for another book, be it the forerunner or a sequel; and Cumming has written other series and standalone stories, so I would be happy to find any one of those. The paperback I read was published in 2022 [2021] by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd., London, ISBN 978-0-0083-6350-5.

Book Review

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Triple Cross, by Tom Bradby

This book is the third episode in the Kate Henderson series, and it is a worthy member; the previous story, Double Agent, was reviewed here, so I won’t repeat the backstory for the latest story, or reveal the ending of the previous one, but certain inferences could be drawn from Kate’s situation at the beginning of this one. Kate has now left MI6, and the narrative commences with her on holiday in the south of France, with her two children, and her husband, Stuart, who is permitted to leave Russia temporarily; but not enter Britain, from which he is barred, on account of his earlier treachery. Her children continue to hope for a rapprochement between their parents and, surprisingly [for Kate, as much as for Fiona & Gus] this appears to be on the cards. Almost inevitably though, she becomes aware of being under surveillance while away from their gîte, and manages to lose the pursuit car with some arguably dangerous driving—especially given her passengers—but only to find on returning that the prime minister, James Ryan, has imperiously imposed a visit upon her, and she has no choice but to listen to what he has to say.

There is still a high-level mole in MI6, codenamed Dante, and Kate is to be tasked—all objections ignored—with leading an independent, but also highly secret, for obvious reasons, investigation into the agent’s identity; in the process, also, finally laying to rest any suspicions about the prime minister’s loyalty, which Kate thought had been conclusively proved by the inquiry in which she played a large part before she left the service. There are two prime suspects [although there are others including, awkwardly for Kate, of course: herself]: the current and the former head of SIS, known as C; the current C, Ian Granger, and the previous one, who was always kindly avuncular towards Kate, Sir Alan Brabazon. The links, both direct & indirect, which both of these highly qualified and very clever men had with the Russians, Igor & Mikhail Borodin, who played significant parts in the previous story, would need to be scrutinised in great detail before a decision could be reached. Kate works with a small team, one of whom is her close colleague, Julie Carmichael, but also two others over whose selection she has no choice: Shirley Grove, Ryan’s cabinet secretary [who oversaw Kate’s previous inquiry], and a young [and very hunky] assistant private secretary to Ryan, Callum Ellis.

As ever [or so we are led to believe] in the murky world of espionage and the security services, nothing can be taken at face value, and suspicious coincidences & occurrences which seem too neat or obvious must be considered extremely carefully, which leads Kate, understandably, to reëxamine all the circumstances & personal associations which led to the current situation. Before long, she realises that she has no choice but to make a trip into ‘the lion’s den’, Moscow, to obtain in person from a new agent some information which will finally & conclusively unmask Dante. Unsurprisingly, there are complications, but to reveal any more would spoil the plot: suffice to say that the dénouement, although unexpected, is conclusive, whilst leaving the door open for further instalments in the series, towards which I look forward with anticipation. The Penguin paperback I read was published in 2022 [2021] by Bantam Press, an imprint of Transworld Publishers, London, ISBN 978-0-5521-7786-3.

Book Review

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Double Agent, by Tom Bradby

This author’s name might already be familiar to some of my British readers, given that he has worked extensively as a journalist & correspondent for the Independent Television Network, and that work has encompassed political affairs, so at the very least, it can be said that he knows of what he writes: much more than your present humble blogger, anyway. In addition to the Kate Henderson series, of which this is the second member, he has also written six other novels which, notwithstanding that he had, to 2020, been with ITN for thirty years [which is slightly belied by his annoyingly youthful-looking photograph accompanying the bio on the inside back cover], does beg the question of how demanding his ‘day job’ must be, but to be fair, and with no disrespect intended, authors who churn out piles of books, seemingly on a conveyor belt, tend to be part of a committee, rather than independent scribblers, slaving away in a garret, so it’s probably not too difficult to find a spare hour or so to commit some thoughts to an electronic record, which can then be scrutinised & knocked into shape by editors & proofreaders.

As stated, this book is the sequel to the story which introduced the character, Secret Service [possibly rather too generic a title, but no matter], but that is no impediment to an enjoyment of this story because the backstory is either detailed right at the beginning, or nuggets are drip-fed into the narrative as it progresses; this is a very common device, and perfectly acceptable, and has been adopted by television drama for story arcs [although the somewhat irritating practice of previewing the next episode at the end of the current one, “Next time!”, is now very common, and it is even more irritating in ‘real-life’ documentaries & travelogues, where it is used at the end of each segment, “Coming up!”, before the commercial break!]. That said, I would be happy to read the previous story, even though I now know the ending: there is a school of thought that we enjoy a story more when we already know the ending, so perhaps this proves it.

Kate Henderson is a senior Secret Intelligence Service, aka MI6, officer; head of the Russia Desk; and, although it is presumably more common now for women to hold senior positions in the security services, she is perhaps unusual in that her husband was also an MI6 operative, but defected to Russia because he was unmasked as a mole, codenamed Viper. This was understandably traumatic for her, so at the beginning of this story, she is still suffering the effects of the fallout from this bombshell, and only just managing to hold her work together. She is, however, lucky [possibly implausibly so?] that her aunt is the head of the Personnel Department, and spends a lot of time at her home, to help look after Kate’s two children; also an old and close friend works with her in the same department. One major fly in the ointment is that Kate has been assigned a deputy, Suzy Spencer; “slim, pretty, northern, state-educated and half Vietnamese”, who has been seconded from 5 to replace her former deputy & friend, Rav, who was killed at the unsuccessful end of the previous mission, “Operation Sigma”. This is quite clearly the result of her husband’s treachery, so it is just one more thing for Kate to be concerned about.

The ‘meat’ of the story concerns the potential defection of a senior Russian Intelligence officer, Mikhail Borodin, as well as his father, Igor, the former head of the SVR, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, and his wife. This has come about by having fallen out of favour somewhat, as a result of tensions between the SVR [the successor to the KGB] & the GRU, Russia’s military espionage agency: apparently, Igor has been ousted in a coup, orchestrated by the GRU, and his colleague, Vasily Durov, is already under arrest. What would sweeten the deal is that they would supply allegedly categorical evidence that the current British Prime Minister is an agent for Russia, and has been for many years; this evidence would include financial payments, and video footage showing the man engaging in sex with underage girls, when he was a soldier in Kosovo. Naturally, there is always the chance that this evidence could be faked, so Kate knows she has to proceed very carefully, but this awareness is complicated by her suspicion that at least one of her current colleagues could also be a mole. During the action, Kate meets up with an erstwhile colleague [and old flame, natch] from her time at University in Russia, and even endures a somewhat awkward overnight stay with her estranged husband in Moscow. It’s not a bad yarn, as spy stories go, so I will keep my eyes open for other publications by Bradby. The Penguin paperback I read was published in 2020 by Bantam Press, ISBN 978-0-5521-7553-1.