The Best Revenge - Gerald Seymour

 

If James Bond has a direct opposite it would be Gerald Seymour’s master spy Jonas Merrick. Unlike Mr. Bond, Jonas never goes into the field to do any dirty work or to gather vital information about the threatening intentions of foreign governments. Jonas, in fact, so seldom leaves his desk once he arrives there promptly each morning that his colleagues have very little idea what he does all day long. Jonas is such a non-entity to the rest of MI-5 that he has become a joke. He has one friend at the top, and one or two nearer the bottom of the organization - and he likes it that way.

“Jonas had no university education, he had never in three decades with the Fivers been on a promotion course, he ignored summons to meetings where policy and progress were examined…And he was not sure why they still tolerated him.” (Chapter 4)

But, unbeknownst to almost everyone within MI-5, Jonas has probably done as much or more to protect the security of the UK and the West than anyone else in the building. And now, he’s on the verge of cracking a long-embedded UK Chinese spy network, one so important to China that heads are literally going to roll all around the world if Jonas is successful - and one of those heads just might turn out to be his own. Because this time, Jonas has become so deadly from his desk chair, that the other side is coming for him.

And Jonas is not ready for them - not even close. After all, he really doesn’t like dealing with actual people.

“It was the essence of Jonas Merrick’s professional life that he stayed huddled inside his cubicle, and had his phone and his computer, and his own library of paper files that he took home to read, the cat sprawled on his thighs. He would have claimed that the way he worked was to keep emotion and consequence at arm’s…” (Chapter 16)

Not this time, Jonas. Not this time.  

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The Jonas Merrick Series:

The Crocodile Hunter (2021)

The Foot Soldiers (2022)

In at the Kill (2023)

The Best Revenge (2024)

Gerald Seymour has also written thirty-seven standalone novels, the most recent being 2020’s A Damned Serious Business. Among my favorites of the standalones are: A Song in the Morning, Home Run, Killing Ground, The Waiting Time, Holding the Zero, and Rat Run. 

 

The Secret Hours - Mick Herron

 

Mick Herron's The Secret Hours is a novel that can be read and enjoyed on multiple levels. For some it will serve as a standalone novel, possibly even an introduction to Herron's work and his take on the world of espionage. For others, those readers who have already read all or most of Herron's Slough House series, The Secret Hours will read as the prequel to the series that they've been hoping for for a while now. 

Spies and politicians have always been closely linked, and they do not always agree on exactly which of them should be calling the shots - especially when it comes to means and methods. That's why one disgruntled prime minister decided to form the Monochrome inquiry, a small group tasked with uncovering any "historical over-reaching" by the British spy agencies. And now, just when it seems that the inquiry will come to nothing, the committee learns of something that happened in Berlin in 1994, something that fits the definition of over-reach perfectly.

Herron's story alternates between flashbacks to 1994 that are seen through the eyes of a young agent on her very first assignment and that same agent's witness testimony in the present. What the witness tells the committee will reveal the details of an operation that went so badly that its repercussions were felt at the highest levels of MI5 both then and now. 

But as I say, readers are certain to experience The Secret Hours differently. The novel's premise has all the makings of a standalone spy thriller, and it certainly works well as one, especially for readers who make the effort to keep up with all the character names right from the beginning. But longtime Slough House series readers are going to quickly figure out that there's a lot more there for them than for standalone readers. They will start to recognize characters from the series despite the fact that those characters are working in Berlin under aliases. They will begin to smile to themselves when they realize, that their favorite series characters have not changed a whole lot since this 1994 career-defining fiasco - and they will laugh out loud at the caustic wit and sarcasm they have become so accustomed to in Mick Herron's prose style. 

Personally, I'm grateful that I am caught up on the Slough House series, including novellas and short stories, because The Secret Hours answers so many questions I had about incidents only alluded to to one degree or another in the series books. This is most definitely the series prequel I've been wishing for.

Mick Herron jacket photo

The Last Agent - Robert Dugoni

After reading Robert Dugoni’s soon-to-be-released The Last Agent, I am more thankful than ever that a book with the rather strange title The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell caught my eye almost exactly a year ago. When I picked up Sam Hell in May 2019, Robert Dugoni was a new-to-me author whose work I was completely unfamiliar with; by the time I finished the novel a few days later, he was someone I wanted to know a lot more about. Still unaware at that point that Dugoni was best known for the five-book David Sloan series and the then six-book Tracy Crosswhite series, I happened to stumble upon a new Dugoni book on display at my local library called The Eighth Sister a few weeks later.

 

Much to my surprise, The Eighth Sister was nothing like The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell. Instead, I held a spy thriller in my hands that rivals the classics of the genre in complexity, character development, and sheer storytelling. Charles Jenkins, as a six-foot-five black man, is not your typical CIA spy, much less one who has much of a chance of blending into a Russian crowd. But that’s who he is, and that’s what he has to do if he is going to survive long enough to get back to his ex-spy wife and children. Jenkins only makes it out of Russia in The Eighth Sister at all because a heroic Russian agent sacrifices her own life to make his escape possible – or so he believes.

 

But what if it turns out that she’s not dead?

 

Now, in The Last Agent, Jenkins learns that Paulina Ponomayova may be suffering a fate worse than death – months-long interrogation in the notorious Lefortovo Prison at the hands of one of Russia’s most ruthless interrogators. Jenkins is not even sure if the woman he’s heard about really is Paulina, but he knows one thing: if it is her, he will not  leave her behind. Jenkins will do whatever it takes to rescue the woman who saved his life and allowed him to meet his new baby daughter. Without her sacrifice, that could never have happened.

 

So it’s back into Russia, where all Jenkins has to do this time is free Paulina from one of the most security-conscious political prisons in the whole country and get them both safely back to the U.S. Even James Bond in his prime might find this task a bit difficult, but it’s going to take a series of miracles for an unusually tall black man - a sixty-something-year-old one, at that - to pull off this one.

 

Bottom Line: The Last Agent picks up almost where The Eighth Sister ended. The two novels are so closely tied together, in fact, that the reader can’t help but be a little astounded that Jenkins would dare risk his life by returning to the country he so recently barely escaped with his life. That, of course, is exactly the point. Charles Jenkins is not the kind of man who could ever turn his back on someone who sacrificed her life to save his. If fate has given him the unexpected chance to even the scales, he is going to take that chance while he has it. Robert Dugoni has written another exceptional spy thriller, one that works well as a standalone, but is even better when read as the sequel it is. The Charles Jenkins series is proving to be a good one.

Review Copy provided by Publsher for Review Purposes

The Eighth Sister - Robert Dugoni

It was only after I read Robert Dugoni’s The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell that I learned the author is probably better known for the two series that he continues to add to, the David Sloane series (of five books) and the Tracy Crosswhite series (of six books), than he is for his three standalone novels. I was suitably impressed by Sam Hell and decided to explore the author’s backlist a bit. Before I could do that, however, I got sucked in by a brand-new Robert Dugoni spy thriller called The Eighth Sister that has left me more determined than ever to check out the Dugoni backlist.

The Eighth Sister impresses me as kind of a throwback to all those Cold War era spy novels that I’ve read and enjoyed over the years except that it’s a little more cynical than I remember most of those novels as having been. There are the usual agents, double agents, even the semblance of a team-rivalry between the various spy agencies (both domestic and foreign) in this one, but what strikes me as most unusual is Dugoni’s decision to use a 6-foot five black man as his spy hero. After all, it will not be easy for a man like Charles Jenkins to blend into the background in Mexico and Russia, the two countries in which Jenkins works for the CIA. I admit to being a bit skeptical at first but realized soon enough that this kind of challenge makes the Charles Jenkins character even more fun than he otherwise would have been.

Robert Dugoni

Charles Jenkins is in his early sixties and he has not worked for the CIA in decades, ever since becoming so disillusioned with the agency that he walked away from it without a word to his superiors. Jenkins, married with a young son and a baby on the way, now runs a security consulting business that is struggling to fight off what seems to be an imminent declaration of bankruptcy. So, when his old Mexico bureau chief shows up at his door and offers Jenkins a CIA assignment that will pay him enough money to save his business and his home, he reluctantly agrees to take the job. A Russian agent is identifying and killing, one-by-one, a group of seven Russian women (known within the agency as the seven sisters) who have been spying for the U.S. for a number of years. That deadly Russian agent has been dubbed the eighth sister – and the CIA wants Jenkins to find her. 

But when Jenkins does identify the eighth sister, he learns that she is not at all what he expected her to be – nor, it seems, is anyone else with whom he’s been dealing. Now he will be lucky to get out of Russia with his life, much less save the lives of the four surviving sisters.

The Eighth Sister is a fast-paced thriller that turns out to be almost a chess match between Jenkins and the Russian agent who is chasing him across Russia. The two men are so well matched, in fact, that they grudgingly begin to respect each other’s abilities and to plan their next moves accordingly. Jenkins may be a master of misdirection, but after the Russian begins to take that particular talent of his into account he draws closer and closer to the fleeing American. Little does Jenkins know, though, that even if he makes it out of Russia, he will have to face an even more powerful enemy that wants to destroy him.

Bottom Line: The Eighth Sister is a highly atmospheric and well-researched spy thriller that is sure to please fans of the genre. Dugoni’s descriptions of the Russian winter almost gave me frost bite, but I still enjoyed this one so much that I want to explore the Dugoni backlist now more than ever. Good stuff.