The Old Enemy - Henry Porter

 This being my first encounter with the world of Henry Porter, I had not read previous Paul Samson thrillers.   It didn't matter: Porter soon caught my attention and brought me up to speed.   A lot has gone on in the past, clearly, but now is apparently the time to settle old scores.   A former spy legend, Robert Harland, is murdered on a Baltic beach.   International billionaire Denis Hisami is handed papers soaked with poisonous chemicals on his way to give evidence to a congressional committee in Washington DC.   And in London Paul Samson, ex-MI6, protege of Harland, friend of Hisami and lover of Hisami's wife Anastasia, is attacked by a knife-wielding beggar whilst doing some private sector work surveilling a young woman called Zoe Freemantle who is involved with a dubious not-for-profit eco-agency called Greenmantle.

From there, it's a matter of unravelling a complicated intrigue dating back to pre-1989 East Berlin and stretching all the way to the White House and Number 10 Downing Street.   In other words it's today's dystopia: Russian interference and its billionaire backers, especially the tech bros.   Porter does it really well.   He has the international aspect just right.   His characters are complex and compelling.   The final set-piece in the reconvened congressional hearing is absolutely masterful.   For once we actually need the post-climax epilogue to fully understand what just happened.   I was very impressed.   Henry Porter goes on my list of must-reads.

Other Paths To Glory - Anthony Price

 Anthony Price won the CWA Silver Dagger for his debut, The Labyrinth Makers (reviewed here earlier this year).   He won the Gold Dagger for this in 1974, which was also shortlisted for the Dagger of Daggers, the best of the last fifty years.   It is really quite something.

Price sticks with the unlikely hero of The Labyrinth Makers, the eccentric polymath Dr David Audley of Military Intelligence.  But he is not what might be called the front line protagonist here.   That is Paul Mitchell, a young researcher who is making himself an expert on certain aspects of World War 1.  Mitchell is researching at the Imperial War Museum when he is approached by Audley and Colonel Butler.   They want academic assistance - something to do with the Somme.   Mitchell refers them to his superviser, Professor Emerson.

That night, returning home via the canal towpath, Mitchell is approached by two other men.   They too ask if he is Mr Mitchell.   They don't want assistance.   They want to kill him and chuck him in the canal.  Fortunately he survives, which is more than his mentor Emerson managed earlier in the day.   He was bludgeoned to death in his own home, which was then set on fire, destroying all the research for his next groundbreaking book.

Before he knows it, Mitchell is in Flanders Field, disguised as Paul Lefevre of the Tank Corps, seconded to assist coach tours of veterans revisiting their traumatic youth and paying respects to fallen comrades.   But one war cemetery, by Bouillet Wood where hundreds of troops were simply annihilated, is difficult to access.   This is because the French secret service have acquired the manor house there for secret summit meetings, one of which is scheduled imminently.

That, as we might expect in a first rate espionage thriller, is not strictly true, and it is Mitchell's task to find the truth.   He is backed up by Audley, who has been drawn in by his French counterpart and old friend 'Ted' Ollivier, and Nikki MacMahon, who really isn't a representative of the French Ministry of Tourism.

Other Paths To Glory is every bit as good as The Labyrinth Makers (for me, it was slightly better but only because it is about precisely the aspects and events of WW1 that most interest me).   Like the very best thriller writers - like Len Deighton, for instance - you feel confident that Price has done his research and knows his subject backwards.   There's an excellent quote on the back of this edition, from the Sunday Times: 'Price unbeatably blends scholarship with worldliness, flattering us to bits."   Yep.

The Shot - Philip Kerr

 What a range Philip Kerr had!   The best 'good Nazi' series ever, with Bernie Gunther, supernatural, sci fi, and, with The Shot (1999), perhaps the best Kennedy conspiracy thriller of all time.

Sam Jefferson is an assassin, America's finest.   He has carried out hits for the CIA, FBI and even the Mafia, but he doesn't work for any of them.   He is independent.   Or perhaps, after being a POW in the Korean War, he answers to different masters.

In late 1960 the mob brings him down to Miami to take out Castro and enable them to recoup their Cuban assets.   Sam Giancana and Johnny Rosselli are collaborating, informally, with the CIA.   Giancana has just delivered the crucial Chicago vote which enabled John F Kennedy to defeat Nixon in the presidential election.   Sam's deal with Kennedy's crooked father Joe is that the Kennedy administration will lay off the Mob.

Sam Jefferson heads for Havana and scopes out the Castro hit.   He has no problem moving around the city because he is half Cuban himself.   He delivers the feasability study to Johnny Rosselli and promptly absconds with Sam Giancana's money.   Giancana therefore hires local FBI man Jimmy Nimmo to track Jefferson down.

Sam meanwhile is working with another Miami FBI staffer Alex Goldman.   Together, they are planning to assassinate the president-elect.   Why? - I'm not going to say.   However, one suggestion is that Sam wants to kill JFK because a mob guy 'accidentally' played him a tape of Kennedy having sex with Sam's wife, who is one of his election staffers.   Mary ends up dead soon after.   Sam has disappeared, emptying the house of clues.

But Sam has other residences, other names.   Franklin Pierce is one of the names he goes by in New York.   Sometimes he's Marty van Buren.   He has other women in his life, women from Central America.

Attention moves to Jimmy Nimmo's investigation.   Nimmo is a likeable character.  He tracks down Jefferson's NY apartment.   He figures out that Sam is planning to take out Kennedy before the swearing-in on January 20 1961.   The question inevitably arises for the reader: We all know when Kennedy was actually taken out, November 22 1963; so how can this fictional version be satisfactorily resolved?   BY the supremely capable Philip Kerr, that's how.   I didn't fully twig even as it played out on the page in front of me.   And I absolutely love it.

The Good Liar - Nicholas Searle

 The Good Liar was Searle's debut back in 2016.   He took a tremendous risk, starting his novel with a deeply mundane online date between two pensioners of eighty or so.   A thriller writer risks losing a lot of genre fans right there.   I stuck with it, thankfully, and can report there is nothing mundane about The Good Liar.   The twists keep coming and you genuinely cannot put the book down.   Searle increases the complexity with seemingly random flashbacks, mainly for Roy Courtnay, our devious octogenarian.   You think you have got a step ahead of the story - only to find that Searle confirms your suspicions on the next page - you've been expertly led to your deduction.   I began to wonder if Searle was being slightly less thorough with Betty, Roy's target and antagonist, but oh no, that's another twist.

My only criticism is that, as so often happens with contemporary novels, The Good Liar is two short chapters too long.   It's the last two chapters, so no real damage done.   I just thought they were misjudgments.

I read one of Searle's other, more recent novels, A Fatal Game, earlier this year [see review below] and was hugely impressed.   Must track down the other, A Traitor in the Family.

The Rutland Connection - Michael Dane

Michael Dane writes from experience in The Rutland Connection.   In his former life Dane was an investigator for HM Customs & Excise before moving to a similar investigative role in the private sector.   The reader is left in no doubt that this is how the National Investigation Service runs surveillance on a drugs target and this is the language they use.   Likewise the locations, including the bizarre Belgian/Dutch town of Baarle Nassau, all ring true.   As for the titular Rutland, that is where Dane now lives.

The story is both conspiracy thriller and character study.   In many ways, the teamwork ethos - both Customs & Excise and the smugglers of illicit pharmaceuticals - reminded me of early Mick Herron.   But at the narrative heart we have two old school operators, Frank McBride, the Senior Investigating Officer, and Brigadier Bernard Butcher (Ret) who rather fancies warming up his old skills.   Both are in the process of handing over to the next generation, which I found both a neat touch and a subtle way of revealing character.   Given that this is Book One in the Frank McBride series, and given the final twist at the end of the novel, I fancy we will see more of both.

The plot is twisty throughout, the writing style crisp and pacey.   I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The Blackbird - Tim Weaver

 Weaver's hero, David Raker, is a private investigator of missing persons.   In this case, CCTV caught the Gascoigne car going over the edge of a steep hill.   When police arrived ten minutes later the car was on its roof and on fire.   When the fire was put out there was no trace of the driver, Aiden, nor his wife and passenger, Cate.   Two women witnesses, both of whom had called 999, had watched the entire time and seen no one crawl or be pulled from the wreckage.  Many months later Cate's parents hire Raker to solve the mystery.

Raker soon discovers that Cate was a promising young photographer who was working on a project about the unsolved Dunes Murders (the remains of three women found on a beach in Northumbria).   By the time of the crash, the project had turned into a book.   So where is the manuscript?   How far had Cate got with her inquiries?

The compelling aspect of Raker's character is the extent to which he is prepared to dig.   This is what justifies the 400+ pages of the book.   It takes a while to get going, and I have to admit I thought about giving up - but the slowness of the start is essential if we are to fully appreciate the full measure of Raker's compulsion.   There are many earlier books in the series and these probably explain the reason behind Raker's almost suicidal determination.  This book might have been easier to engage with had there been some sort of clue.   That said, once it gets going The Blackbird becomes really difficult to put down.

Also from an earlier book in the series comes Raker's involvement with an ex-cop called Healy for whom he has faked a death and arranged a new life.   Again, some sort of explanation would have been nice.   The way Healy is incorporated into the main narrative is cleverly done, though.

Weaver is an excellent builder of plot - excellent bordering on superlative.   He uses several voices to tell his story, all of them credible.  His one fault, and it only emerges towards the end, is some frankly bizarre word coinage.  I won't use them here because perhaps other readers find them acceptable.   New coinages don't usually bother me; in fact, I usually enjoy them.   Not these.   These are naff and I wish Weaver hadn't bothered.  Will they deter from other books by him?   Actually, yes, which is a pity because I was already Googling his other work when I spotted them.

Night Agent = Matthew Quirk

 Night Agent belongs to the thriller sub-genre pioneered by TV series 24 and Homeland, in which the deep state - supposedly the upholders of order - turn out to be the enemy, the enablers of chaos.   Night Agent itself is now the heavily promoted season headliner on Netflix.  I neither have nor especially want Netflix, so the book is all I can comment upon.

It's a great read, well-written and extremely well constructed, the twists coming at regulat intervals.   Yes, like so many contemporary books, it goes on a tad too long for my taste.  That said, the plot is so high-concept that I do feel some explanation was necessary after the denouement.   I don't want to give too much away, but the concept is a high as it can get in the sub-genre.   Does the rot rise all the way to the highest office?

Peter Sutherland of the FBI is the night agent in question.  His job is to sit overnight in the White House Situation Room in case the phone rings.   If it rings, there is a code to be confirmed, then Peter passes it on to either his FBI boss, James Hawkins, or the White House Chief of Staff, Diane Farr, end of involvement.   It was Farr picked Sutherland for the job.  She knows he can be relied on because of his father's sins.   Sutherland senior was a high-ranking FBI official who turned traitor and killed himself.   Sutherland also suspects he was chosen because he is a permanent outsider; if he messes up, well, you know, the sins of the father...

Peter came to Farr's attention because he was the hero of a Metro crash a year or so earlier.   Peter suspects the crash was not entirely an accident, and is quietly looking into it in his downtime, which is considerable.   The phone is only going to ring if something goes badly wrong.  And the vasr majority of the time, nothing goes that awry.

Until it does.   The phone rings.  It is a young woman, panic-stricken.   She is hiding in an empty house.   Armed men have come to the house she lives in and killed her aunt and uncle.   They are now coming for her.   She knows the pass code.   Her uncle told her before he died.   He also told her to mention a red ledger.   Peter passes her on as instructed.   But he can't resist going by her place on his way home.   He can't stay away from the funeral.   After the funeral, the girl approaches him.   She heard him speak earlier.   She recognised his voice from the phone call.   Who is he?  What is going on?   Why were her aunt and uncle executed by men speaking Russian?

As I say, it is perfectly done.   Quirk keeps the writing simple and straightforward because the plot is so complex.   The characters are well-rounded.   The good guys have flaws, the bad guys can behave reasonably.    I don't find (especially after Trump and January 6) the central concept too far-fetched.   And I absolutely devoured the book.   Great entertainment done wondrously well.   Almost makes me want Netflix, but I will continue to resist the temptation.

Shifty's Boys - Chris Offutt

 There's a genre emerging of American bluegrass communities colliding head-on with large-scale contemporary corruption.  I have previously blogged about Ace Atkins' work in this field.  Now we have Chris Offutt's series featuring Army CID officer Mick Hardin, of which Shifty's Boys is Book 2.

Hardin is back in his old Kentucky home recovering from IED injuries and lodging with his sister Linda, the county sheriff, currently up for re-election.  Somebody murders and dumps Barney Kissick, no great loss, the local drug-dealer so low on the scale of social responsibility that he's known far and wide as Fuckin' Barney.  Mick, though, knew Barney in childhood, so feels obliged to offer his condolences to the family matriarch, the titular Shifty.  She asks him to find out who killed her son.  Then she loses a second son, a harmless idiot who never hurt anyone.  And someone torches the cabin Mick inherited from his Pawpaw, incinerating the geek who fixing up the Hardin family truck.  That's simply going too far.  Mick teams up with Shifty's eldest boy, Ray, a Special Ops Marine, and takes on the people with secrets to hide.

It might be predictable but it's great fun and very well written.  Offutt is notably good and adding extra dimensions to his characters.  There's an especially effective scene when Mick delivers the long-delayed divorce papers to his ex.  And Ray is humanised from being just another killing machine by the fact that he is gay, a secret he thought he'd hidden from his mother Shifty, but...

Billy Summers - Stephen King

 

The latest King novel, Billy Summers is the story of a former US army sniper turned high-price, high-principle hitman.  Billy only kills bad men.  In this instance, he is promised a huge amount of money - enough to retire on - to terminate a lowlife killer who kills a man who beat him at poker and attacks a woman who brushes off his advances.  It seems a lot of money for a lowlife who's likely to get the needle anyway, but a lot of the cash is to cover Billy going undercover in the hick town, potentially for months, whilst the victim's lawyers argue against his extradition to a death-penalty state.

Billy always figures that these waters are deeper than they seem.  Billy likes to seem dumber than he really is.  It's part of his self-preservation routine.  He takes precautions, which get compromised when he settles into his fake life a little too well.  So he carries out the hit and disappears.  The promised payment doesn't arrive.  Billy has been stiffed.  That is unacceptable.

The rest of the novel is Billy's quest for settlement.  He has a young woman, Alice, alongside, whom he rescued from the street after she had been gang-raped.  Gang rape is also unacceptable and a price has to be paid.  All through the book we get Billy's back story: how he became a killer, then a sniper.  We also get a powerful reprise of The Shining when Billy and Alice are in Colorado, preparing the final act, but that is the only hint of the supernatural in Billy Summers.  In that sense it follows Mr Mercedes and the Bill Hodges trilogy.  In a sense we also get the gunslinger of The Dark Tower.  A lot of King tropes, then, which only enrich the story.  It is a beautiful book, as good as anything King has written, not a single bum note that I could see.  A consummate treat from a living, thriving master.

V2 - Robert Harris

 

Harris yet again surprises with his ability to turn quite thin material into a compelling read.  I mean, everyone knows the story of von Braun and his V2 rockets.  We know they didn't win the war and we know they didn't do as much damage - or create as much fear - as the V1 doodlebugs.  Indeed, this story is so thin that Harris actually splits into two narratives - English woman, German man - to stretch it to an acceptable read.  And yet it is great fun, even thrilling at times.  How does he do it?

Well, he has clearly done his research.  That is a given with Harris.  He carefully gives us just about enough to show it is reliable without overburdening us as so many modern authors do.  For example, in order to make us even slightly interested in what happened at Peenemunde he gives us an RAF raid on the site in which Rudi Graf's love interest is killed.  Graf is Harris's German protagonist, a scientist, not a Nazi, and a friend of von Braun, who is an SS officer.  Our English heroine is Kay Caton-Walsh, a WAAF who sleeps with unsuitable men and blags herself into a proper war job, working out the launch site of rockets.  This is perhaps Harris's best device.  As the end of the war draws nearer, the protagonists in this novel are brought physically closer - Graf and the rockets at the Dutch resort of Sheveningen, Kay and the trajectory-trackers a few miles south at Mechelen in Belgium.  The thrilling part of the book comes when the Germans figure out the Allies are there and aim a rocket at them.

There are a couple of interesting characters who go nowhere, which unsettled me, notably a feisty girl who works in the Nazi brothel, and a psychopathic SS man who builds the rocket factory with slave labour.  V2 is a good book, and great fun to read, but with a bit more ambition it could have been outstanding.

Night of Error - Desmond Bagley

 

Been looking for a classic thriller about manganese nodules? Look no further - this is it.  It's also the most thrilling of the four Bagley thrillers I have read over the last year.  Mike Trevelyan is an oceanographer, as is his estranged brother Mark.  Now Mark has died somewhere in the Pacific and Mike has come into some of his notes and samples.  It turns out these samples are not the common or garden manganese nodules which litter the floor of the ocean and are not worth the trouble of dredging them up.  No sir, these are super duper nodules incredibly rich in minerals and worth a billion or more.

So we have our maguffin and off we go on our treasure hunt to the South Seas in a brigantine crewed by Mike and Mark's late father's former commandos.  Out to stop them, and reap the treasure for themselves, are agents of a mysterious South American mining combine who will stop at nothing - not even murder.

Night of Error has everything - nightclub singers, millionaire adventures, leper hospitals, drunken medics, hand to hand fighting, a jaw-dropping twist and a literally explosive climax.  It comes hotly recommended.

The Snow Tiger - Desmond Bagley

 Another two-for-one by Bagley.  The Snow Tiger, from 1975, is a disaster thriller of the type so popular at the time.  Ian Ballard returns to the mining town in New Zealand which he left as a child.  Back then he was the only child of a schoolteacher widowed in the war.  He returns as the grandson of the patriarch of the family mining firm to take charge of the mine on his mother's land which has just struck gold.  He instantly runs up against the Peterson family, who effectively drove him out of town twenty-five years earlier when Ian was wrongly blamed for the accidental death of one of the Peterson twins.  Crazy Charlie, the surviving twin, is still after Ian's blood, which is awkward, given that Ian has fallen for Liz Peterson.

Then the avalanche happens.  The town is destroyed.  Dozens of people die. including the eldest Peterson brother.  A Committee of Inquiry is set up to find out who, if anyone, is to blame for the disaster.  Local opinion is divided.  Most blame Ian and the mine.  A handful blame the Petersons, who own the land adjacent.  Luckily for Ian, the world expert on avalanches is his friend Mike McGill, who warned the town of the danger before it happened.

Bagley uses flashbacks sparked by evidence given at the inquiry to tell the story.  In anyone else's hands this could have been a disaster in itself, but Bagley is a master who can even make the molecular structure of snow on the ground exciting.  The flaw in the book, however, is that our protagonist Ian Ballard isn't really the driving force - indeed, he is in hospital when the denouement happens.  The driver of the story is actually McGill, a far more interesting character anyway.  Apart from that, The Snow Tiger is a cracker.

The Pictures - Guy Bolton

"In Hollywood, no one is innocent." So runs the blurb. But in Hollywood, in 1939, no one called the movies 'pictures.' Yes, it's quite a clever pun pointing to the solution of the mystery, but if it's that good, and that important, Bolton should have set the novel in the British film industry.

Title apart, it's an impressive fiction debut. Jonathan Craine is an LAPD detective who has a special relationship with MGM.  He was married to one of their lesser stars until she committed suicide. Now he's back after compassionate leave and finds himself summoned to another movie suicide - a producer married to another MGM star whose latest movie is about to hit the screens. I instantly thought Jean Harlow, especially when the fictional studio puts out the same 'closet homosexual' cover story the real MGM used when Harlow's husband Paul Bern shot himself in 1932. Fortunately, The Pictures is not a version of the Harlow story - nor, unfortunately, is the bereaved star Gale Goodwin remotely like Jean Harlow. Instead, it's mainly the story of a studio on the verge of collapse that has staked everything on the upcoming Wizard of Oz and will do absolutely anything to maintain it's family-friendly image.

Craine is an excellent protagonist, conflicted in so many ways but always fundamentally straight. His second-in-command,Patrick O'Neill, starts off annoying but ends up a hero. Gale Goodwin is also well drawn, as are all the Hollywood bigwigs. I would have liked a cameo or two from other movie stars of the period to flesh out the illusion of actuality, but I don't want to nitpick. The plot is cunning, and The Pictures has that often overlooked element in modern thrillers, that is to say genuine thrills. There is a car chase through the Hollywood Hills that had me spellbound and a shootout at the station very nearly as good. Guy Bolton is definitely a name to look out for.

The Sun Chemist - Lionel Davidson

How on earth do you make a thriller out of writing footnotes for the letters of Israel's first president? Lionel Davidson shows how. Igor Druyanov, a historian of Russian descent, is commissioned to prepare a couple of installments of the massive multi-volume Letters of Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952). The years in question were Weizmann's wilderness years - like Churchill, these were the Twenties and Thirties - when he was ousted from the Zionist movement and had to revert to his original profession as a research chemist.

The key to the tension here is that the book dates from 1976 and begins a couple of years earlier, in 1974. This is when OPEC jacked up oil prices, creating a crisis in the West and making the polite, ever-smiling Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani a hate figure. At rhe time it seemed as if the greedy, ungrateful Arabs were threatening the developed world with a new stone age. Indeed, the West has spent the last fifty years developing alternative power sources to avoid a repeat, whilst the Arab world has taken a more moderate line in exploiting what is, after all, their only real resource, and a finite one at that.

But Davidson's book is firmly anchored in 1974-6 and the Israel of that time, a year or so after the first Arab-Israeli war. Davidson might have been born in Hull but at this time he was living in Israel. In the story, it emerges from Igor's research that Weizmann and his research associates might have hit upon a way of synthesizing combustible fuel from root vegetables. It isn't quite so simple, and Davidson spares us none of the science, but that is essentially it: an infinite supply of fuel to a power-hungry world; a windfall beyond price to a state just establishing itself in the deserts of Palestine and the end of time to their near neighbours in the Gulf.

It's a great book and an astonishing feat of writing from Davidson. He was never a scientist, always a journalist but, by God, he does his research. Every part of the book, from the history that drives Druyanov, to the world of international science and petrochemicals, is utterly convincing. Davidson, to be fair, was a peripatetic journalist and, as I say above, lived in Israel - but I've never read anything, fact or fiction, that brings that raw state so alive. Davidson, in my view, is even better than Ambler, better than Greene, and so unusual in his choice of subjects. He deserves to be better remembered than he is. As for this book, is there a thriller in print today that is more topical?

The Border - Don Winslow

Winslow - back on top form. Brilliant.

The Border concludes the Cartel trilogy and brings it bang up to date. Art Keller emerges from the Guatemalan jungle to take over as head of the DEA, having realised that the only way to tackle America's drug problem is to take out the big money men. That doesn't just mean the Cartel bosses, because Keller now knows there are people above them on the US end of the chain. For the Cartels drugs mean money and power. For the financiers power can be bought by money. And now they plan to buy the ultimate power.

Meanwhile, the fact that Keller has finally taken out Adan Barrera, head of the Sinaloan Cartel and effective boss of bosses, means that the second tier go to war to determine a successor. The lack of order means there are vacuums for figures from the past to return to: men like Rafael Caro, who tortured and murdered Keller's partner thirty years ago, and Eddie Ruiz who was there when Keller took out Adan.

It is a big, BIG story, and rightly so. In so many ways it is the story of our time, the fifty year war on drugs which America has not and will never win. How close Winslow's fiction comes to reality will be open to debate. What is inarguable, a stone fact, is that nobody does this story better than Don Winslow. Does anybody else even dare to try? Each of the three novels - The Power of the Dog, The Cartel, and now The Border - is a major achievement. The three together are a landmark.

The Traitor - Sydney Horler

Sydney Horler (1888-1954) was a British thriller writer immensely popular in his day. He was serialised in the News of the World and sold more than two million copies of his many books. He was very much of his day - an admirer of officers and gentlemen, a fan of empire, a disdainer of the foreign. His popularity died with him and this 2015 reissue by the British Library, I have to say, does little to warrant rediscovery.

Horler writes in an obvious hurry and like many hurried authors is overly reliant on dialogue to advance his plot. Worse, he has a habit of referring in these tedious passages to 'the speaker', which I will henceforth take to be a sure indicator of rubbish. The plot is labyrinthine. In 1917 Captain Clinton falls for a sexy French-Garman femme fatale and as result 5000 Allied troops die on the Front. For this service he is naturally given command of MI5. Eighteen years later his adopted son Bobby Wingate falls for the same femme and is court-martialled for passing British secrets to damned foreigners.


The thing is - the point of interest, really - that we are talking 1935. War is coming, not with Germany this time but with Ronstadt, which is very like Germany. Indeed, to a large extent, even in the novel, it is Germany, perhaps the bits we don't associate with decadent Weimar. The tyrant of Ronstadt is Kuhnreich, who doesn't have a Charlie Chaplin moustache but is otherwise noticeably Hitlerian. It's an odd choice by Horler and I suspect he was one of the many Brits associated with newspapers who admired Hitler and the revivified Reich. It spoils the book, on balance (actually, it's one of many things which spoil a not-great-to-start-with book) because it is so blatantly Ruritanian.


It's the odd, unintended things which add the occasional pleasure. The burglar who breaks into Bobby's girlfriend's bedroom has a gas gun to put her to sleep. The secret writing is revealed by the very last thing we would imagine. There just aren't enough of them to make reading it worthwhile. Martin Edwards, who also oversees the British Library's classic crime reissues, says in his introduction that Horler relies on a "least likely suspect" for the final twist. All I can say is, I knew who it was and I never usually get these things. On the positive side it was, very much, the final twist.

Munich - Robert Harris

The blurb on the back, from The Times, describes Harris as "Master of the intelligent thriller". You can't argue with that. In three successive standalone novels - An Officer and a Spy, Conclave and now Munich - he takes storylines you already know the end of (or don't care in the case of Conclave) - and somehow, inexplicably, makes them exciting. I say 'inexplicable' but it must be possible to work out how he does it. I must take the time, sometime.


Here, obviously, this is the Munich Crisis of 1938. We all know how that turned out. Chamberlain waving his bit of paper at Croydon airport; 'Peace in our time. Part of how Harris makes this work so well is his unexpected sympathy for Chamberlain, until David Cameron came along, surely the most despised British Prime Minister of the media age. Harris, we recall, did a variant of this in The Ghost, wherein his unforeseen contempt for the clone of his old friend Tony Blair was the only saving grace of (for me) an execrable book. The other device that works very well in Munich is the use of two protagonists, Hugh Legat and Paul Hartmann, former Oxford friends who now attend the last-minute 'peace' conference as rising stars of the their respective civil services. How they will come out of it, particularly Paul who is most at risk, provides both the tension and a breathtaking twist right at the end which I for one never saw coming.


Thus a great deal of artistry goes into the construction of Harris's story which hides comfortably behind his seemingly effortless and efficient prose. The Times is right. There's only one word for Munich, that's masterly.

Prayer - Philip Kerr

Philip Kerr died, too young, a month ago. He is best known for his exemplary Bernie Gunther novels, several of which have been reviewed on this blog. I had only read one of his non-Gunther novels, the unimpressive sci fi Gridiron (1995). Prayer (2013) is very different. It is, I suppose, a splice of supernatural suspense and a police procedural.  Giles Martins, originally from Scotland, is now with the FBI in Houston, Texas. His marriage to Ruth is on the rocks because 'Gil' has lost his faith in God. Meanwhile more famous sceptics - authors of anti-theistic books - are dying in very unusual, even terrifying circumstances. Because this might be some form of domestic terrorism, Gil is assigned to investigate.


I don't really want to go any further with the synopsis because Kerr's novels are so brilliantly plotted there is always the danger of giving too much away. I very much like the typical Kerr twist - just as Bernie Gunther is the oxymoronic 'Good Nazi', so Prayer is fundamentally the testing of Gil's lack of faith. As such it works very well. You either roll with the premise or you don't. My lack of belief is as solid as these things get yet I was happy enough with the stages of Gil's purification. Kerr has always had a gift for characterisation and is almost as good with women characters as he naturally is with men. Ruth, the Christian wife, is a bit of a pain but Sara Espinosa, Gil's romantic interest, and especially the enigmatic Gaynor Allitt are strong enough to carry novels of their own.


Kerr has always been at home with first-person narration. Prayer is no exception. That said, I was less comfortable with the various chunks of reported prose, written by others, the style of which seemed always the same. I did not take to the villain and I find thrillers always work better if the villain is as charismatic on the page as he or she is said to be in the action.


Not Kerr's best book, then - he came out of the gates with his best material, the so-called Berlin Noir sequence - but well worth reading for its own sake. I might try and get hold Hitler's Peace next, a non-Gunther Nazi novel.

Tatiana - Martin Cruz Smith

Like everybody else, I read Gorky Park when it came out thirty-plus years ago. I later read Stallion Gate, which I loved. I wanted to read Rose but never came across a copy. And now here is Tatiana from 2013 and Arkady Renko, hero of Gorky Park, is still going strong.

He's had a tough time in the intervening thirty years. For one thing, time runs differently for him and he is only perhaps a dozen years older than he was in Gorky Park. He has a bullet rattling round his skull and an adopted sort-of son. He may have had DS Victor Orlov as a sidekick in the old days; if so, I don't remember. Orlov is the cop other writers would have made their protagonist - dark, drunken, violent, but rock solid on the side of the angels. Cruz chose Renko, the outsider, the man of principle, who could have risen to the top of the tree if only he had been prepared to play dirty.


Russia, of course, has changed completely since the Eighties. For one thing it's Russia instead of the USSR. Those who would once have risen to power through the Party, now rise through gangsterism. Mob bosses are billionaires. Honest cops and investigative journalists, however, remain the enemies of the state.


Tatiana is an investigative journalist. She has jumped to her death from her rundown apartment. Renko doesn't believe it. It is not his case. He is supposed to covering up whoever it was shot billionaire hoodlum Grisha Grigorenko. Tatiana and the late Grigorenko lead him to Kaliningrad, the capital of organised crime, where he also commits to solving the murder of a high-price interpreter by a man driving a butcher's van with a happy plastic pig on top.


It's the story details that make Cruz Smith's novels stand out from the rest. Here, amongst many others, we have the Ferrari of sports bikes, chess hustling, the interpreter's personal shorthand system. Some of the characters are more interesting than others. You've just got to love a capo di capo called Ape Beledon. Most important of all is the authorial control. He has a lot of material - he is determined to explore the psyche of his hero and, to a lesser extent, those close to his hero - but he never forgets that this is a thriller. It's purpose is to excite the reader. Which it certainly does. Pure reading pleasure.

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!