I rather enjoyed this. It's a bit different from the usual spy thriller, and all the more enjoyable for that. Really rather good. ( )

Max, a professor at LSE specializing in intelligence and spies, is sent a mysterious message and goes to meet an elderly woman who claims to have written a memoir about having been an undiscovered Russian agent throughout an illustrious career in MI6. She needs Max to authenticate her notebooks for publication.

That's how this begins, but there are long sections of the memoir and sections from the perspective of an MI5 agent trying to keep a lid on things. I found this complicated - so many chiefs and directors and acronyms and people only known by their almost indistinguishable titles - and so twisty I got tired of the twists. It was endlessly repetitious on the topic of Max's disappointing career and his divorce. It all came together in the end (I think!). ( )

Max Archer, a mediocre academic specialising in the history of intelligence during the Cold War, is approached by Scarlet King, a long retired legendary British spy in the post-Second World War period. Scarlet wants Max to verify her memoirs and help get them published. This is the starting point for this terrific novel that immediately moves into a hall of mirrors where nothing and no one is as they seem and where revelations and reversals appear on almost every page.

Scarlet has two big secrets to reveal. Firstly, about Project Hercules that spirited talented Nazi scientists into Britain, giving them new identities and guaranteed work along the way, expunging any criminal deeds they had committed for the Fuhrer. The second secret was that Scarlet, who had reached the highest echelons of the British intelligence community across a very long career, was a Russian spy.

The spycraft elements of this book ring true. All the technical aspects of what a spy would or would not do and how they related to and interacted with their own bosses and other spy agencies are utterly believable. The various characters are all interesting and have a depth and humanity (good or bad) that draws us in to find out how they fail or succeed.

The action is nicely paced and drives the story along, leaving plenty of room for character development and the odd bit of background. This is an excellent read. ( )

I have always enjoyed books about spies and espionage, where fiction or factual, and this book manages to straddle both sectors. Although it is clearly a novel, it is peppered throughout with references to real people, many of them involved in one or other of the ‘scandals’ that have rocked the intelligence communities in Britain and America since the end of the Second World War.

Dr Max Archer is an academic, lecturing in political history from the Cold War era, with a particular specialisation in intelligence matters. He is intrigued when he receives what appears to be contact from the almost legendary figure of Scarlet King, one of the few women to rise to relative prominence in the cloistered male backwaters of MI5 during the Cold War years. Scarlet offers a meeting, and Archer can’t resist the lure.

This plunges Dr Archer and the reader into a sinuous tale tracking back and forth between the latter years of the Second World War up to around 2010. There are numerous plot twists along the way (some more effectively managed than others), and the pace never flags. While Richardson doesn’t match the purple prose of John le Carré (well who could?), he does keep a firm hold on the reader’s attention.

This book was high octane adventure, and very entertaining. ( )