"The Persian" by David McCloskey

 Written by an ex-CIA man, you would expect this spy thriller to have the ring of authenticity and it does, in spades, from interrogations (though, thankfully, the book does not go into details of the torture) to the organisation of terrorism to drone attacks to traffic jams in Tehran to guns. What does not always come with an ex-spy is the ability to write a good tale but this was a well-constructed, well-written and entertaining story which had me turning the pages. It reminded me - and I have no higher praise - of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John Le Carre.

The story is largely narrated through the extracted confessions of Kam, an Iranian dentist of Jewish descent, who has decided to spy for MOSSAD to fund his California retirement dream. We also see things through the perspective of his MOSSAD spymaster Arik Glitzman. Iranian Colonel Ghorbani is sending drones to assassinate members of Glitzman's team and Glitzman has devised an audacious plan to kidnap the Colonel and take him to Israel. This requires Kam to con Roya, an innocent Iranian who happens to work as administrative assistant to Ghorbani's team, into thinking that he is working for Iranian security. But could love complicate the con? (I told you it was like the le Carre book.) 

It's a great story told with verve. But I was thoroughly depressed by this portrait of fanatics on both sides engaged in a potentially endless game of tit for tat, a war of attrition in which decency and respect for humanity cannot survive.

Selected quotes:

• “He begins to chew on another sugar cube and stares down Kam with the look of a man who despises fornicators because he desperately wants to be one.” (Prologue; The interrogation room)
• “Developed haphazardly, growing in disorganized spurts, Tehran, like most of us, lacks any coherent centre.” (Ch 3)
• “Lean and beautiful with cheek bones high as heaven.” (Ch 3)
• “Amir-Ali's leaking blood counts down like sand rushing fast through an hourglass.” (Ch 4)
• “She now had a phone, cigarettes, and an audience with an Iranian official. Whatever the Mullahs say, Paradise is a fluid concept.” (Ch 30)
• “Rivka laughed - it was the first time I'd heard one from her, and it was more delicate, hesitant, than I'd expected. I suppose she didn't have much practice.” (Ch 38)
• “Believe the breath from my mouth.” (Ch 40)
• “Love comes with a knife, my mother would say.” (Ch 52)
• “Love is the king of all cons.” (Ch 52)
• “The afternoon had brought the smog, and I sucked in a huge breath of Tehran's toxic air: all exhaust, no relief.” (Ch 72)

May 2026; 388 pages

First published in GB by Swift Press in 2025

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Kala" by Colin Walsh

Fundamentally a crime thriller. A teenage gang broke up after one of them, Kala, disappeared. Fifteen years later, four of them reunite in the Irish town. Then Kala's remains are discovered. 

 It is told in multiple first-person using the present tense. The characterisations are strong, elevating the narrators from what might otherwise be stereotypes (a rock star, a journalist, a cafe worker) into believable characters with whom I developed rapport. This meant that I was concerned to know what happened to them, especially since no punches were pulled I didn't know, when they faced life-threatening jeopardy, whether they would survive. The mysteries of the past (Kala's disappearance, Mush's scars etc) were solved in a nicely drip-feed fashion which kept me turning the pages nearly all the way to the end, the final few pages kept me going because I wanted to know whether at least one of the characters would make it. If you add in the beautifully written prose, this novel is elevated from just another crime thriller.

My only caveat is the plot. Mystery piles upon mystery but the solution requires two of the villains to make more or less unprompted confessions. While the first of these is by means of hints, the second revelation which basically solves the mystery is all a bit 'deus ex machina' and therefore slightly unsatisfactory.

Otherwise this is a hugely enjoyable read.

Selected quotes:

• “There's a turning melt of sky above us.” (Summer 2003)
• “Our group’s like a murmuration of birds, turning telepathically into ever new shapes.” (Summer 2003)
• “Kinlough is a sudden sea foaming up around me, and I am islanded in the grinning churn of Hogan's Square.” (Friday: Helen)
• “I am old enough to stop being afraid of many things. I will never stop being afraid of teenage girls.” (Friday: Helen)
• “Time archived in the lines of his skin.” (Saturday: Helen)
• “Quiet’s not peaceful, man. Quiet is when the monsters come out.” (Saturday: Mush)
• “People are like trees; live long enough, and your life becomes a tangle of trajectories, a crooked monument to its own mutilations.” (Saturday: Helen)
• “Life is like this: immense when you are inside it, but manageable from the outside.” (Sunday: Helen)
• “Every bedroom, a laboratory of the self.” (Sunday: Joe)
• “Organs squelching. All that blood. The things that keep us alive happen in the dark, because they're fucking ugly.” (Sunday: Joe)
• “She is acting like she is just another bloody adult. Talking constantly and saying nothing.” (Sunday: Helen)
• “The things that make life comfortable are always unacceptable, if you look at them square on. Someone, somewhere, is always suffering so you can be happy.” (Sunday: Mush)
• “Feels like my body’s made of fucking bumblebees.” (Monday: Mush)
• “The moments when you can say something are just that - moments - and once they're gone, they're gone, and you've added another brick to the wall.” (Monday: Mush)
• “You pretend you're cool but ... you need to read the instructions before doing anything.” (Monday: Joe)

Note:

Apollonia, the name Joe sometimes uses for Kala is either a female name meaning 'belong to Apollo', a god linked to poetry and music, which seems appropriate but unlikely, suggesting a higher degree of classical education than teenage Joe probably had, or the first name of an actress who was the lead singer of the girl group Apollonia Six (which might reference the six members of the teenage gang) and co-starred with the musician Prince in the movie 'Purple Rain'.

April 2026; 406 pages

Published in 2023 by Atlantic Books

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Slow Horses" by Mick Herron

Significantly better than most of the offerings in this genre. this is 

an enjoyable and entertaining spy thriller, containing plenty of comedy and moments of genuine tension.

A student has been kidnapped and his captors are threatening to behead him live on the internet. Can the 'slow horses' of Slough House, where the failures from MI5 are sent so, bored with mundane paperwork, they will resign, save the young man. 

It is written in the past tense using multiple 3rd person limited points of view.

Selected quotes:

• Hobden “still read [journalistic] copy as if it were Braille; bumps in the language letting him know when D-notices were an issue; when the Regent's Park mob had left their fingerprints on the facts.” (Ch 2)
• “Half of the future is buried in the past.” (Ch 2)
• “Nobody wanted to get on the wrong side of Moody, and most sides of Moody were the wrong one.” (Ch 2)
• “He worked with a bunch of morons. Couldn't make a pun with a dictionary and a Scrabble board.” (Ch 4)
• “She waved her hand airily; her standard semaphore for trivial detail.” (Ch 5)
• “You had more chance of reaching a consensus with a vox pop on Marmite.” (Ch 8)
• “If we're paying for supper, we get to glance at the menu, surely?” (Ch 8)
• “The look she bestowed upon him would have stuck six inches out the back of a more sensitive man.” (Ch 8)
• “‘Once upon a time’ was another way of saying the old days.” (Ch 8)
• “The wheels started coming off before you screwed them on.” (Ch 11)
• “This couldn't have fallen apart faster if you'd bought it at IKEA.” (Ch 11)
• “Sleep was ceding control. While you slept, anything might happen.” (Ch 13)
• “Web was under thirty, and married to the notion that anyone twenty years older was lucky to have made it through the flood.” (Ch 15)

Notes:

• The dodgy politician Peter Judd ("PJ") is a caricature based on ex-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson (BJ).
• At one point, Slough House is compared to Pincher Martin's Island. Pincher Martin is a novel about a shipwrecked sailor written by William Golding.

March 2026; 328 pages

First published in 2015 by John Murray

My paperback edition was issued in 2017

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Cliff House" by Chris Brookmyre

 

A group of women assemble for a hen weekend on a remote and uninhabited Scottish island. Once there, they become cut off, all communications cut. One is kidnapped. 'The reaper' contacts them, threatening to murder the kidnap victim unless each of the women confesses their secrets. They all have them.

Michelle is a pop star who ditched her guitarist, childhood friend Helena, on the road to stardom. Helena, in revenge, has hacked Michelle's cloud and released a self-made porn tape of the pop star having sex. Jen, another childhood friend, murdered her husband Jason, who raped Michelle, and who is Beattie's brother. Nicolette, Kennedy and Beattie also have secrets. 

It's a sort of version of And There Then Were None (other titles are also available) by Agatha Christie. It is told in the past tense from the third person limited PoV of each of the women. 

I guessed every one of the twists.

Selected quotes:

• "Sometimes when you have a secret it makes you feel vulnerable. You are afraid of what you could lose, afraid of what everyone might discover. But ... being the one who knew a secret gave you a power over everyone who didn't." (Helena)
• "The kind of place where the bouncer frisked you for weapons, and if he didn't find any, gave you one before he let you in." (Beattie)
• "She was starting to understand what it must feel like to be a stag when the royal family were loose in your postcode." (Nicolette)
• "You tend to scream louder when a blow hits a sensitive spot." (Michelle)
• "Looks had always meant a lot to Jason. Some called him vain, buit that was what the envious said when someone more blessed than themselves wore their pride without apology." (Beattie)

Entertaining.

March 2026; 344 pages

First published in 2022 by Little, Brown

My paperback edition was issued in 2023.

I have also read The Cut by Chris Brookmyre

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Cut" by Chris Brookmyre

A crime thriller told principally from the PoVs of Millie, once a make-up artist on films, recently released after serving over twenty years for a murder she didn't commit, and Jerry, a mixed-race film studies student whose accent seems to become more Scottish as the novel progresses. They are on the run across Europe after Millie stumbles across a clue to why justice miscarried for her and somebody tries to kill her. As is typical of the genre there is the mystery of a supposedly-cursed horror film whose negative has gone AWOL, a leavening of comedy in the dialogue between these two mismatched characters, and a secret which must be revealed before the final reel. 

Entertaining.

Selected quotes:

• “Maybe she didn't have a trust fund, and maybe Danby didn't either, but Jerry was damn sure that whatever their fathers gave them, it was more than his. The only thing daddy had given Jerry Kelly was pigmentation.” (Belonging)
• “Jerry had heard it said that there were two types of rich people: smart people who knew they'd got lucky, and lucky people who thought they were smart.” (Belonging)
• “She had dealt with people like Anne for decades: a rulebook with shoes.” (A social call)
• “Everybody dreams of being a starving artist until dinner time” (Blood)
• “Weirdly, after months of imposter syndrome at uni, he was finding it easier being an actual imposter.” (Intruders)
• “It turned out that sourcing condoms was not an issue when a rock band's tour bus was parked outside.” (The Fog)
• “It was like I was searching in the fog, not because the answers lay there, but because the fog looked intriguing, mysterious. But fog is not just insubstantial, it is constantly changing.” (The Fog)
• “Peroxide locks that hadn't changed a Pantone in decades.” (Casting)
• “I wonder if the French have a word for volte face.” (Casting)

March 2026; 404 pages

Published by Little, Brown in 2021

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Hawker and the King's Jewel" by Ethan Bale

 A classic thriller based in late mediaeval Europe. After the defeat of Richard III in the Battle of Bosworth, Yorkist knight Sir John Hawker has to protect Sir Giles, Richard's bastard son, and deliver a valuable ruby to the Doge of Venice. Together with a motley band of warriors, including at least one who will betray him, Hawker travels across Europe to encounter more duplicity in the city whose streets are canals. 

And whatever happened to the Princes in the Tower?

It's a classic of its kind. The research is obvious, allowing the reader to wallow in authentic reenactment. The scenes of fighting are regularly delivered. There are good characters with whom the reader can identify and hope will survive (Jack the squire and Sir Giles) and there are villains (Dieudonnee). The plot is perfectly paced on the four-part model, even if the final quarter is split in two so that a final twist can be delivered. 

My only complaint? Referring to cheese (I presume) as the "the white stuff" in a too obvious attempt to avoid repeating the word 'cheese'.

Selected quotes:

• "Even an arsehole has its purpose." (Ch 3) 
• "Marriage comes from love as vinegar comes from wine." (Ch 21)
• "You are like the scribe who can see nothing more than the page his nose touches." (Ch 22)

November 2025; 337 pages

Published by Canelo in 2022

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"All the Colours of the Dark" by Chris Whitaker

 I was hooked from paragraph two, when we are told that protagonist Patch "lay dying in the woodland" which was a little (= massively) misleading because he survives. Nevertheless, I was hooked.

I fell for the will-they-won't-they romance between two kids growing up together in small town America. One-eyed Patch wants to be a pirate. Saint, being raised by her grandmother, wants to be his friend. So when he encounters posh Misty, another kid in their year at school, being abducted, and fights for her, and gets stabbed, and then himself kidnapped and imprisoned in a dark cellar, Saint turns detective to find where he is. But after she rescues him, his head is full of the girl who was in the cellar with him and he can't rest, not even as an adult, until he finds her. 

The path of true love never did run smooth.

I gobbled the pages. At times it was very hard to read because I feared something dreadful would happen. I haven't felt so involved in a character since Chris Whitaker's Duchess in We Begin at the End and even Duchess wasn't as heartbreaking. Whitaker put me through the wringer with this book. I couldn't consume it all at once, although I wanted to, because it is 576 pages, but I wanted to. I found it difficult to sleep because I was so worried for fictional characters. Whitaker is a magician.

And afterwards?

The author is a conjurer who misdirected my attention so I didn't focus on the sheer implausibility of the story he is telling. In many ways, this is the cliched small-town America of the cosy movies. Sammy, the town drunk (and art gallery owner and serial adulterer) has a heart of gold and bankrolls Patch on his mission to discover all the lost girls of America and reunite them (or their bodies) with their grieving loved ones. Patch also becomes a bank robber (a sort of pirate) and can't be captured until Saint joins the FBI. A one-night stand makes Patch a parent, a fact he only discovers after serving time. And, most strange, the friendly 'I'll look after everyone' Chief of Police for this little community participates in a miscarriage of justice involving a victim, a friend of his, who refuses to speak on his own behalf and who doesn't tell his best friend a crucial secret until he is on death row. In hindsight, the whole plot is ridiculous but Whitaker is so good at doing what he does that I didn't notice until afterwards.

By the way, Patch doesn't need to become a bank robber because he is such as supremely talented artist that his paintings are in demand with collectors but he refuses to sell them because they are paintings of abducted girls and he'd rather get a criminal record. He scarcely needs to eat or sleep. Everyone adores him.

By the way, Saint is the only law enforcement officer who can make sense of the cryptic messages encoded in what the girl in the cellar, who is incredibly knowledgeable, said to Patch which he has remembered word-for-word and which has enabled him to paint his pictures so they are the very spit of what has been described.

But I loved it.

Part of his technique with which he spun the web that captivated me is to hardly ever tell the reader anything. Instead the narrative is made of fragmentary gnomic sayings which flash like broken diamonds and make the reader struggle to piece together what the hell is going on. It's very clever. The reader never knows what crucial pieces of evidence say. Even after the denouement, it is not possible to be really certain. It is a masterclass in telling a story by what is not said.

And, of course, he makes you fall in love with the characters from the very start.

Selected quotes:

• “He stole only what he needed and not ever what he wanted.” (Ch 8)
• “A girl who looked to books for answers to questions that would never be asked of her.” (Ch 17)
• “Saint wanted to ask what it was like, to lose the thing that defined you. But perhaps she knew: it left you someone else. A stranger you had no choice but to tolerate, and see each day and feel and fear.” (Ch 28)
• “Death when it came was not light or confession, forgiveness or peace or fire. It was that cold piece of time before you were born, that glance into history books that told you the world went on before and would go on again, no matter who was there to witness it.” (Ch 39)
• “At ten years old he realized that people were born whole, and that the bad things peeled layers from the person you once were, thinning compassion and empathy and the ability to construct a future.” (Ch 39)
• “People talk about falling in love like a fall is ever a good thing.” (Ch 40)
• “God is a first call and a last resort, from christening to deathbed. In between is where faith is tested. The mundanity. Anyone can drop to their knees when they're facing crisis, but doing it when everything is steady ...” (Ch 96)

August 2025; 576 pages

It was first published by Orion in 2024.

My paperback edition was issued in 2025.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Dumas Club" by Arturo Perez-Reverte

 

A murder mystery set in the world of book-collectors. 

Lucas Corso is an investigator for booksellers and bibliophiles. At moment he has two missions: firstly to authenticate some manuscript pages of chapter forty-two of The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas and secondly to track down the three extant copies of the Book of the Nine Doors of the Kingdom of Shadows, a book of occult and esoteric knowledge which includes nine prints reproduced from a another book supposedly written by the devil himself. Corso travels from Spain to Sintra in Portugal and then to Paris. But his life appears to be in danger from a man with a scar, the double of d'Artagnan's adversary Rochefort, and Rochefort's accomplice Milady. And who is the strange girl who follows him: a guardian angel or something else?

The mystery is compounded by the fact that the three copies of 'Nine Doors' have illustrations which at first sight seem to be the same but on closer inspection contain differences that may or may not be significant. The present day story repeatedly harks back to the storyline of the 'Musketeers' and we also learn about occult literature. There some interesting twists at the end, although one had been heavily signalled (from the first paragraph of chapter one) with bookish references. 

It's an entertaining read but there was a lot about books and this rather overshadowed the mystery/ thriller element of the plot.

I did enjoy the self-confessed cowardice of the sidekick.

Also by this author: The Flanders Panel, a murder mystery set in the world of fine art.

Selected quotes:

• "Although I am narrating this story after the resolution of the momentous events to come, the very nature of the loop - think of Escher's paintings, or the work of that old joker, Bach - forces us to return continually to the beginning." (Ch 5)
• "It's Julian the Apostate crying, 'You have defeated me, Galileo'." (Ch 7)
• "The art of locking devils inside bottles or books is very ancient ... Gervase of Tilbury and Gerson both mentioned it in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. As for pacts with the Devil, the tradition goes back even further: from the Book of Enoch to St Jeronimus, through the Cabbala and the Fathers of the Church." (Ch 10)
• "Like any intelligent being, the Devil likes games, riddles." (Ch 10)
• "In the real world many things happen by chance but in fiction nearly everything is logical." (Ch 14)

July 2025; 323 pages

First published in Spanish by Alfaguara in Madrid in 1993

My paperback edition (translated by Sonia Soto) was issued in 1996 by The Harvill Press

Filmed as 'The Ninth Gate' starring Johnny Depp and directed by Roman Polanski.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Dead Simple" by Peter James

 A crime thriller packed with action.

This is the first of a long series of novels starring Roy Grace, a police officer based on the south coast of England. It's fast-paced (the chapters average five pages) and I read it very quickly because I wanted to finish so I suppose you could say it was a page-turner but I skim read because I wasn't very interested.

There were a number of things that disappointed me:

• I like murder mysteries. There was very little mystery. This was mostly because the narrative head-hops between the points of view of many of the characters so we quickly learn whodunnit.
• Except for the character introduced in a major twist about two-thirds of the way through the novel. To introduce such an important character so late without any foreshadowing seemed to me to break the rules of the genre. It felt like a diabolus ex machina.
• Some reviewers have described it as a police procedural but routine forensic work seems to be jettisoned in favour of action sequences: no-one followed up the soil analysis, nobody bothered to enquire about the land owned by the missing person's property development company. The investigating officer seemed more interested in psychics than science. 
• I didn't feel that a single character had depth. I didn't care about any of them which was perhaps just as well given how many ended up dead. 
• The hero's back story and physical attributes were given in a chunk near the end of chapter three. This felt like I was reading the author's notes but it wasn't quite so clunky as when he did the same thing for the villain near the end of the book.
• Given that it head-hops between multiple points of view, the reader very quickly learns who are the baddies - except for the extra villain brought in by the major twist at about the two-thirds mark - so there is very little mystery about these murders and almost no element of whodunnit. Instead it relies on shocking and sensational writing and short chapters. 
• There was also a significant amount of casual misogyny designed, presumably, to appeal to a mostly male readership. I understand that Roy Grace has been celibate for none years since his wife left him and must be feeling sexually frustrated: given that he seems to remember his wife purely for her bodily attributes I can understand why she went. We meet him in chapter 3 when he is driving to meet a woman he has hooked up with over the internet: "Her picture was hot! Amber hair, seriously pretty face, tight blouse showing a weapons-grade bust, sitting on the edge of a bed with a miniskirt pulled high enough to show she was wearing lace-topped hold-ups and might not be wearing knickers." The next paragraph made me laugh aloud, when Grace's interior monologue described himself as "an old-fashioned romantic". What a bizarre and ridiculous juxtaposition. 
• The misogyny even enters the similes: "A one-armed bandit at the far end of the room winked and blinked away forlornly like an old tart in a windswept alley." (Ch 73) I'm not sure that works for me on any level.

This tasted like fast-food: rapidly assembled, predictable, unsubtle and easy to consume. I prefer to eat more interesting meals carefully cooked to have depth and complexity.

Selected quotes:

• "Misty rain was falling from a sky the colour of a fogged negative." (Ch 1)
• "Good sex is one per cent of a relationship; bad sex is ninety-nine per cent." (Ch 68)

March 2025; 457 pages

Published in 2005 by Macmillan.

My Pan paperback was issued in 2019.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Spy Who Came In From the Cold" by John Le Carre

 The classic Cold War espionage story written by a master of the trade.

Following the collapse of the spy network that he has been running, Alec Leamas retires from the British Secret Service. His life spirals downhill through a succession of meaningless jobs, his disillusionment numbed with whisky. Even new girlfriend Liz can't reach him. After he hits rock bottom, in prison, he is courted by the East Germans and agrees to tell them his secrets. But things aren't as they seem. This is a game of bluff and double bluff, of trick and be tricked. And as things collapse towards a disastrous conclusion, there is still one more twist to the story.

It is narrated in the 'omniscient' third person past tense (with occasional authorial glosses) but the reader only has access to the thoughts of the principal characters, Leamas and Liz. This keeps the narration tightly focused.

But I think the main reason why this novel stands head and shoulders over most of its genre is that Le Carre takes time to build up the characters and the settings and that he keeps everything so everyday and therefore so believable. Despite his vast experience and his repertoire of skills, Leamas is no James Bond (although Ian Fleming's original Bond is more vulnerable and grittier and credible than his film alter ego). This is real world spying and the reader can imagine themselves in the role and identify with Leamas without falling into fantasy. 

The other separation between this and its many imitators is the morality question. I compared this with Rip Tide by Stella Rimington (in real life a spymaster) in which the action is performed against a backdrop of 'us' and 'them': whatever we do is good and whatever they do is bad. But Leamas operates in a world where he can scarcely justify his actions even to himself (he seems mostly motivated by anger and hate). It's a seedy, sordid world of deception which corrodes the souls of the often pathetic actors who play in it. And it is perfectly matched to the background: the pathetic fallacy reigns supreme.

This makes this novel is one of the greatest spy stories of all time. The film starring Richard Burton is superb too.

Stylistically, it fits well with its near contemporaries: the work of Alan Sillitoe, Stan Barstow and John Osborne etc: the 'kitchen sink' dramas and novels of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

It won a Somerset Maugham Award in 1964 and the CWA Golden dagger in 1963. It was selected by Time magazine as one of the 100 best novels since Time began (1923). The Crime Writers' Association named it the 3rd best crime novel of all time; the Mystery Writers of America ranked it 8th.

Selected quotes:

• “He developed small dishonesties, borrowed insignificant sums from secretaries and neglected to return them, arrived late or left early under some mumbled pretext. At first his colleagues treated him with indulgence; perhaps his decline scared them in the same way as we are scared by cripples, beggars and invalids because we fear we could ourselves become them.” (Ch 3)
• “Liz wanted to weep at the crabbed delusion of their dreams.” (Ch 5)
• “They hated him because he succeeded in being what each in his heart longed to be: a mystery.” (Ch 6)
• “Ashe was typical of that strata of mankind which conducts its human relationships according to a principle of challenge and response. Where there was softness, he would advance; where he found resistance, retreat.” (Ch 6)
• “He had the drunkard’s habit of ducking his mouth towards the rim of his glass just before he drank, as if his hand might fail him and the drink escape.” (Ch 7)
• “Liz made a rather exaggerated shrug, the kind of overstressed gesture people do make when they are excited and alone.” (Ch 16)
• “It was like mid-week evensong when she used to go to church - the same dutiful, little group of lost faces, the same fussy self-consciousness, the same feeling of a great idea in the hands of little people.” (Ch 19)
• “What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They're a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives.” (Ch 25)
• “It's far more terrible, what they are doing; to find the humanity in people, in me and whoever else they use, to turn it like a weapon in their hands, and use it to hurt and kill ...” (Ch 25)

October 2024; 240 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God