In Charles Cumming’s A Foreign Country (HarperCollins £12.99/ebook £7.99, ST Bookshop price £11.69), MI6’s first female chief vanishes just before she is due to start work. Thomas, a disgraced former spook, is asked to follow her trail, and discovers — as he traces her to southern France, then Tunisia — connections to a love affair in her past and the murder of a couple in Egypt.
Cumming’s sixth novel boasts a plot of well-sustained twistiness, a cast of memorable and diverse characters, plenty of plausible spycraft to delight anoraks, and an unexpected topicality — for the Arab spring turns out to be the key to everything. There’s also a pleasing sense of the author emerging from the shadow of John le Carré and finding a voice of his own.
No less accomplished is Chris Pavone’s debut, The Expats (Faber £12.99/ebook £9.99, ST Bookshop price £11.69), in which the narrator, Kate, is a spy who leaves the CIA and Washington DC when her husband, Dexter, takes up a new job in Luxembourg. There, she’s a stay-at-home mum, but her old skills come into play when she realises two fellow Americans, Julia and Bill, who befriend them, aren’t who they say they are.
All Pavone’s central quartet are hiding secrets: this other couple could be spies, or criminals, or criminal-catchers; Dexter has never spelt out what his work in bank security really involves; Kate has yet to tell him she was an agent. Their dance of deceit makes for a captivatingly sophisticated thriller, resembling a Mozart comic opera with guns and computer hacking, and the first-time author’s uncanny technical poise is particularly evident in the interweaving of flash-forwards showing the four meeting in Paris two years later.
Another relocated family is featured in Julia Crouch’s Every Vow You Break (Headline £12.99/ebook £13, ST Bookshop price £11.69), in which Lara, her actor husband, Marcus, and their children spend a summer in upstate New York. Marcus is performing with a theatre company, leaving Lara occupied with family. Then, an old flame re-enters her life. When they had their furtive fling Stephen was another struggling British thesp, but he has since become a Hollywood star — hiding from fame in his expensive house in the woods. Crouch blends social comedy with a thriller plot, and is equally good at both; but she devotes far too much time to the former, so that, instead of being the climax of slow-built suspense, the eventual threat to Lara comes across almost as an afterthought in this lopsided novel. Frustratingly, it could be a genuine page-turner, if 100 fun but diversionary pages were cut.
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In Robert Goddard’s Fault Line (Bantam Press £16.99/ebook £9.99, ST Bookshop price £13.99), Jonathan, the protagonist, is asked to trace missing records before he retires from a mining company. His investigation takes him into his own past and his dealings across four decades with the Cornish family who own the firm — particularly Greville, his driven boss and mentor, and Greville’s privileged but troubled stepchildren, Oliver and Vivien. Whereas thrillers by younger writers often open with sensational prologues, Goddard is prone to begin with as boring a setup as possible, as if challenging himself to hook you anyway. He pulls it off in this yarn, split between England and Italy, which becomes ever more addictive.
Traitor (J Murray £14.99/ebook £7.99, ST Bookshop price £13.49) is set in the 1590s and sees Rory Clements’s “intelligencer” hero, John Shakespeare, with two linked missions. To safeguard a prototype telescope from Spanish agents, he must fetch its inventor, the magus John Dee, back from Lancashire, and hide away the sailor entrusted with it. Soon, there’s a further task: finding out who poisoned the Earl of Derby, Catholic patron of John’s brother William.
Clements can be seen as doing for Elizabeth’s reign what CJ Sansom does for Henry VIII’s, although his novels are less knottily complex and more plot-driven. What’s impressive in the latest is how much of Tudor society it crams in, from the court and Derby’s estate to outlaws and the soldiers in its concluding battle scene.
Bang up to date, in contrast, is Alex Berenson’s The Shadow Patrol (Headline £19.99/ebook £13, ST Bookshop price £11.69), in which the former New York Times correspondent’s series hero, John Wells, is sent by the CIA to investigate claims that the Taliban have infiltrated its Kabul station. The semi-detached spook has to bust a smuggling ring and foil an assassination, in a well-paced tale notable for its pungent dialogue and knack for evoking places. Berenson’s journalistic background shows up in his snapshots of demoralised American soldiers, fighting an unwinnable war.