Second in the Richard Prince series, Sea of Spies follows straight on from Prince of Spies (reviewed recently on this blog). It is now the middle of 1943: Prince is back in England, Hanne Jakobsen, who helped him escape the Nazis, is in Ravensbruck concentration camp. Prince is in England but not back in the police force. His infant son Henry has been abducted in an adoption scam and Prince has been searching for any trace of him.
Meanwhile MI6 is keen to disrupt the clandestine flow of chromium, essential for missile production, from Romania to Nazi-occupied Czechoslavakia via Turkey. Turkey is officially neutral and denies all knowledge, despite pressure from Churchill's Chief of Intelligence Sir Roland Pearson. So Pearson leans on his old schoolfellow Tom Gilbey who persuades Prince to go to Istanbul under the guise of irish journalist Michael Eugene Doyle to gather evidence. While Prince is away Gilbey puts two retired Scotland Yard detectives on the hunt for the missing boy.
Just gather evidence and get out of there - those are Prince's instructions. Of course, that's now how it pans out. Prince is suckered into rescuing a different boy from Nazi-occupied Greece, in return for which he is smuggled aboard a ship carrying chromium to the former Skoda factory in Pilsen.
The story itself is excellent. The problem is, the main plotline isn't raised until Chapter 6 and Prince doesn't appear until Chapter 7. As in Prince of Spies, Gerlis takes too long to get going. Personally I would have started with Chapter 6 and filtered everything else in later. Proofreading, as ever these days, isn't perfect but a more serious problem is the lack of invention with names. There are too many Martins, for example. Likewise, more diligent editing would have revealed clumsily repeated words in the same sentence. Small flaws in themselves but they add up.
On the other hand, Gerlis's geopgraphical setting is first rate, totally convincing. Prince's character continues to develop and there are interesting characters emerging at MI6. Once it gets moving, Sea of Spies is engrossing and compelling. I never thought I could get even slightly interested in chromium.
I like the sound of Ring of Spies, the next in the Prince series - and then there's Gilbey's other series, Spy Masters...
