Sunday, 24 May 2020

Tom Bradby - Double Agent


Rating: 4/5

Review:
Another decent spy thriller from Tom Bradby

Double Agent is another readable spy thriller from Tom Bradby. It follows on directly from Secret Service and I would strongly recommend that you read Secret Service first.

Kate and the rest of the small MI6 circle concerned are trying to recover after the events of last time. The question of whether there is still a high-level traitor remains, and Kate is now offered evidence by Mikhail. There again begins an operation to determine the veracity of this and we get more office and political manoeuvring, Kate putting herself in danger again and so on. It’s all pretty well done and Tom Bradby knows a lot about what he is writing about here – perhaps to the point of overdoing the detail at times.

Alongside this is Kate’s struggle with insomnia and anxiety. Again, Bradby knows a lot about this, writes pretty well about it and it is a very important subject, but for me I didn’t fit comfortably with the style of spy thriller in the rest of the book. I found the two aspects distracted from each other rather than enhanced the book and I struggled a bit as a result.

I don’t want to be too critical; Double Agent is perfectly readable, it has good things about it and I’m sure there will be a third novel in the series which I shall probably read. I hope it is a little more tightly focussed, though, and branches out from the slightly samey structure of the first two.

(My thanks to Random House for an ARC via NetGalley.)

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