Outbreak - Frank Gardner

 Frank Gardner writes top quality spy fiction.  Of course, he has the advantage of twenty years as the BBC's security correspondence, and we all know how he was shot and left in a wheelchair by terrorists in Saudi.   He knows how these things work.   Unlike most novelists, he knows how it feels to be shot.   All of these advantages are deployed in Outbreak, his third Luke Carlton thriller.

It's 2021, in the immediate aftermath of the Covid pandemic.   In Norway British researchers have to seek shelter from the storm and stumble upon a man with a terrible disease.   One scientist realizes she must be infected and stays with the dying man.   One of her colleagues tries to stay outside, the other runs for it.   Luke's first task is to oversee the extraction and track down the runaway.

In fact, all three have been infected.   The scientist who tried to stay outside initially checks clear and is repatriated, thus bringing the contagion into the UK.   It is fatal, incurable, and has been genetically engineered.   The obvious suspects are the Russians - the shed in which the first victim was found is near a Russian mining colony.   There are the usual stiff diplomatic exchanges - this is, after all, in the immediate aftermath of the Salisbury poisonings.   Some of the chemicals involved trace to a factory in Lithuania.   Luke is sent in with expert Jenny Li.

The people at the factory are definitely involved - but maybe the Russians aren't.   They offer to work with SIS.   General Petrov is tasked with finding out who leaked the tech required.   Luke and Jenny are invited to assist and observe.   Meanwhile, in England, people are definitely preparing some sort of bio attack.   Meanwhile, problems loom in Luke's private life.   His girlfriend Elise is pregnant but a little calendar work proves that Luke cannot be the father,

This is a good twist, the sort of twist that I wanted when I read the first Luke Carlton thriller, Crisis, back in 2017.   It's reviewed on this blog.   I enjoyed it but found a few minor faults.   Insufficient in-depth characterisation was one of them.  Gardner has come on since then.   I found no faults in Outbreak.   It's a first class thriller and highly recommended.

Crisis - Frank Gardner

Frank Gardner is the BBC's Security Correspondent who was shot and disabled by terrorists whilst filming in Saudi Arabia in 2004. I became interested in him after watching a documentary series in which he set off, wheelchair and all, to see the birds of paradise in Borneo. So when I saw his first novel. I had to give it a try.

It's not his first book but it is a first novel and has some inevitable faults. His characterisation isn't great and there are scenes that don't need to be there. But it is the depth of knowledge behind the story that draws you in. The idea is a cracker: Colombian drug smugglers decide to take revenge on the Brits who disrupt their trade with a North Korean dirty bomb. Once the clock starts ticking, the device beloved of all the best thrillers, the book becomes thoroughly compelling, as good as any in the genre.


Before that things take their time. It's the inevitable compromise - you have to develop your characters and setting in sufficient detail to make your reader care about the outcome. Gardner's hero, who seems to be continuing in a second novel, is Luke Carlton, an identikit hero with an identikit name, a former Special Forces officer turned spy - which I guess must be a regular thing in real life.


Luke is a newbie at MI6 but he is the obvious man for the job because he was born and raised in Colombia (a prologue in which he loses his parents is one of the scenes I could happily dispense with). His girlfriend Elise and her subplot is a bore, but Luke suffers enough and makes sufficient gung-ho mistakes that we do come to care about his fate. The villains are pretty much the usual black hats - there is no need for them to be anything more. The most interesting characters are the officials at MI6 HQ in Vauxhall Cross (VX), especially Sayed 'Sid' Khan, the conflicted Head of Terrorism, and Luke's line manager Angela Scott.


Crisis is 550 pages. All bar about 50 of them are excellent. A very good debut but Gardner really needs to spend more time on characterisation and giving them more original names.


PS It has just dawned on me that the front cover gives away one of the plot twists. Duh!