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Like James Bond and Jason Bourne, George Smiley, John le Carré’s cerebral spymaster, is too valuable to retire after his creator’s death. But even if commercial considerations helped drive le Carré’s son Nick Harkaway to write Karla’s Choice (Viking £22, $30), the book is an accomplished and welcome addition to le Carré’s oeuvre. Harkaway, the author of several acclaimed science-fiction and fantasy novels, has drawn on his deep knowledge of his father’s work to produce a tale faithful to the originals, while subtly adding a lighter, more modern touch.
The story opens in 1963 after George Smiley has left the Circus, hoping for a peaceful retirement and some quality time with his wandering wife Anne. But when a Hungarian assassin, sent to London to dispatch Laszlo Banati, an émigré Magyar literary agent, has a sudden change of heart and switches sides, Smiley is called back to investigate. Why is Banati targeted for death and why has he vanished? And who is he, really, other than “a charming rogue”?
Harkaway writes with verve and pace as Smiley starts to disentangle the web of connections across Europe that lead inevitably eastward, to the long shadow of his nemesis Karla. Some may miss the slow-paced miasma of gloom that sometimes enveloped Smiley’s earlier outings. But Smiley is surrounded by familiar colleagues and there is compensation in Harkaway’s female characters, never le Carré’s strongest point. Susanna, Banati’s fellow Hungarian émigré and assistant, is finely-drawn.
IS Berry’s debut The Peacock and the Sparrow (No Exit Press £9.99/Atria $18.99) has been deservedly garlanded with high praise and three awards, including an Edgar for best first novel. Berry served as an operations officer for the CIA for six years and also lived in Bahrain, where the book is set, for two years. Shane Collins is an agency operative charged with uncovering supposed Iranian support for a bubbling insurgency against the Sunni monarchy. The book is rich in insider agency knowledge while its notably nuanced character development quickly draws the reader deeply in. “Espionage”, muses Collins, is unique, “the only profession where two people, usually strangers, are . . . as closely bound as lovers, where individual destiny dictates joint destiny”.
Collins’ destiny is soon entwined with that of Almaisa, an attractive artist who swiftly captures his heart — and prompts him to start asking dangerous questions about who is really behind a spate of bombings. Berry’s debut is unlikely to be on the Bahrain tourist board’s recommended reading list. The kingdom is portrayed as a grim and dusty place, riven between ruling Sunni and downtrodden Shia, where indentured labourers toil for meagre wages while an elite of locals and adulterous expats live the luxurious high life. Yet there are flashes of beauty too: the desert shimmering in the heat, Almaisa’s eyes and her dazzling mosaics.
Slim Parsons, the heroine of Henry Porter’s The Enigma Girl (Quercus £22/Atlantic Monthly Press $27, to be published in January 2025), is a disgraced former MI5 operative. Her only mission now is to find her missing brother Matthew. Until she is recalled by the agency to infiltrate Middle Kingdom, a mysterious news website that is publishing ultra-sensitive information. Porter, a veteran Fleet Street journalist and award-winning spy novelist, knows his way around both the corridors of power and the new media. But this tale has a clever twist — its roots reach back to Britain’s wartime code-breaking operation at Bletchley Park. The book is almost 500 pages long, and takes a while to build up speed. But once Porter hits his stride, he delivers another in a series of smart, timely reads.
The first line of The American Mission (Head of Zeus £20/Putnam’s $9.99), “Death came on horseback”, shows why Matthew Palmer, currently the deputy chief of mission at the US embassy in London, has long enjoyed a parallel career as a successful contemporary thriller writer. Alex Baines, a young American diplomat, witnesses the horror of a massacre in Darfur, Sudan, while UN peacekeepers and US marines refuse to intervene. Baines relocates to the Democratic Republic of Congo, trying to do good but he faces a new adversary: a rapacious American mining company profiting handsomely from war and chaos. Like Berry, Palmer deftly deploys his insider knowledge to take the reader inside the world of superpower diplomacy, where profit often triumphs over ethics. First published in the US a decade ago, Palmer’s debut novel could be ripped from today’s headlines.
The exiled foreign communists living in Moscow’s Hotel Lux during the 1920s and 1930s were also prisoners of the Soviet dictatorship. As Stalin’s purges devoured the revolutionaries, they too were tortured or shot on a whim. In The Champagne Wagon (Troubador £10.99), Ralph Boulton’s impressive debut, Harry Speares, a young Welsh miner, travels to Moscow with his father Joseph, a committed communist. Harry soon realises that the workers’ paradise is a dark and very dangerous place. “You see Harry, in Lux, we like people who fit,” says Comrade Zander, their minder. But by the time the Soviet secret police start to hand back German communists to the Gestapo, Harry has realised that he does not fit at all — except with Rosa, Zander’s courageous and engaging daughter. Boulton delivers a sharply observed world of idealism, cynicism and menace, where the sour reek of Stalinist Moscow rises off the pages.
Adam LeBor is the author of ‘Dohany Street’, a Budapest noir crime thriller.
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