The Insider - Matthew Richardson

 Matthew Richardson's second novel is blisteringly up to date.   It asks the question all espionage afficianados are asking: just how deep does Vladimir Putin's interference run in contemporary western states.   Richardson starts with the obvious answer in Britain, which Britain was just beginning to wake up to when Richardson wrote The Insider in 2021, when first Dominic Cummings and then his clownish front man Boris Johnson both fell: Westminster was rotting from the top down.

Richardson then smartly turns the British situaiton on its head.   Both Cummings and to an extent Johnson were outsiders who used Russian money to break Britain.   It was an unusual coincidence that the supremely corruptible Johnson happened to be Mayor of London at the time it was dubbed Londongrad because Russian oligarchs were paying ludicrous sums to buy it.   That was an accident unlikely to be repeated.   Richardson therefore imagines (as the title makes clear) a government corrupted from the inside, a thirty year Putin plan to place a mole to the very top of the British Civil Service.

Solomon Vine, a disgraced head of counter-espionage, is summoned from unwelcome retirement when a Russian media tycoon is murdered at the Savoy.   Alexander Ivanov was Britain's mole with access to Putin's Kremlin.   He was so important, his existence so critical, that only four people knew about him: the Chief Secretary at the Foreign Office, the Cabinet Secretary, the head of MI6, the Chief of the Defence Staff and the National Security Adviser Emma Lockwood, who has summoned Vine.   If there is a mole in government circles, which Ivanov swore there was, it has to be one of these so-called 'Elders'.

Vine is given the highest possible security clearance so he can interview each one.   Very quickly two of them are murdered, clearly by the same person or team who killed Ivanov.   The suspect list is down to two.   But each murder victim has left clues for Vine.   There are files so secret that even MI6 doesn't have copies...

What makes The Insider so compelling is that it seems so simple.   Only two suspects...?   How can anyone get a full-length novel out of that?   Very cleverly is the answer.   And, even more important, wholly convincingly.   This is Russian interference as we all think we know it.   Yes, I guessed the mole by the midpoint, but I in no way guessed what the great plot actually was or the final twist.   It's the best contemoporary British spy novel I've read this year - and I've read some really good ones in 2025.   One of them was Richardson's first novel, My Name is Nobody, which I didn't like as much.   I've also read and reviewed the third, The Scarlet Papers, which was The Times' Thriller of the Year 2023, and which I do remember enjoying hugely.