Rating: 4/5
Review:
An entertaining spy novel
I thought this was a good, entertaining and in places very gripping spy thriller. It is well written and paced with a pretty decent plot and a good sense of place.
The plot has been well summarized elsewhere on this page, but it involves a disgraced British spy, Thomas Kell, being brought back into the Intelligence fold to help to investigate some suspicious deaths of agents and to find the source of apparent leaks of information. We get a classic mole-hunt set in London and Turkey, and it's pretty well done. It is at its best when there is real tradecraft being described - surveillance, counter-surveillance, interpretation of detail in evidence and so on - which has led to comparisons with John le Carré.
Such comparisons are premature, to say the least. The story is a perfectly decent one, but neither the plot nor the characters have anything like the depth and subtlety of le Carré. The, to me, rather overblown aspects of Kell's emotional life and the introduction of a somewhat cliché-ed This Time It's Personal element would have no place in a le Carré novel, for example. It's noticeable, too, that Cumming has a penchant for male lead characters of roughly his own forty-something age and for sensationally beautiful, sexy, intelligent and significantly younger women to fall in love - and lust - with them (see also Trinity Six, for example). Bless! I wouldn't dream of accusing him of using his books for wish-fulfilment, of course, but I do find it all a little credibility-stretching.
I don't want to carp too much. I think we shouldn't get ahead of ourselves with the Great Spy Novel stuff, but I enjoyed the book. I found it very readable and in parts very exciting. Overall, I thought it was a very decent, engrossing spy thriller which would make an excellent holiday read.
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