Rating: 4/5
Review:
A decent spy thriller
Secret Service was a decent spy thriller, but I did have my
reservations.
Tom Bradby has
created Kate Henderson, family woman and chief of the Russia section
at MI6. A tip-off leads her and her team to begin a hazardous
operation which reveals both possible Russian interference in the
appointment of a new Prime Minister, that there may be a Russian
agent among the candidates and that someone is leaking secrets to the
Russians. The plot moves along quite nicely, the who-can-I-trust
stuff is nicely done and Tom Bradby writes pretty well much of the
time. It does get a bit clunky in places, and although the dialogue
is generally convincing, characters do tend to lapse into pretty
stilted speeches rather regularly. Bradby is also no stranger to a
cliché, which gets a bit much at times with sentences like, “I’d
like to bury my head in the sand, but I need to go home and face the
music.”
Overall, it was
sufficiently involving to keep me interested until the end. It’s
nothing that special but it’s not bad by any means and I’ll try
the next one because there’s promise here. 3.5 stars, rounded up
to 4.
(My thanks to
Penguin Random House for an ARC via NetGalley.)
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