This is billed, ludicrously, as Tad Anders Book 2 when in fact Tad Anders is barely a bit-part player. The hero here is Ed Farrow, who lives on a boat moored on the Thames in the heart of London. The focus, however, is James Hallet, a young science prodigy who has made his fortune from a single patent but who has now, accidentally, stumbled on a super-weapon, codenamed Omega Minus, which every superpower, East and West, is itching to get its hands on. The trouble is, the technology only costs a few pounds; the secret is intellectual, locked inside Hallet's head or possibly in his computer. This being 1975, the computer is not exactly portable.
Agents from the KGB and CIA head for London. Hallet meets a beautiful Danish girl, the titular blonde, for whom he would happily give up everything he has - wife, family, fortune, even Omega Minus, which becomes the stake when the KGB under rising star Sergei Venturi kidnap Kristina Olsen, take her to the Polish Embassy (then, of course, part of the Soviet bloc) and torture her. It becomes Colonel Farrow's task to prevent Hallet giving up Omega Minus and rescue the girl who, of course, has been planted on Hallet by the CIA. This Farrow does in a remarkably brutal but utterly convincing way.
Allbeury, we must remember, was a real long-serving spy. Thus his descriptions of how the secret service agencies work comes across as 100% credible. He is clearly on top of the technology involved and in Ed Farrow he has a character as compelling as James Bond or 'Harry Palmer'. Personally I was taken with the politicians in Palomino Blonde: proper, hard=as-nails professionals who mean exactly what they say and who have the authority to deliver. Whatever happened to them?
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