Raymond Carr: The Curiosity of the Fox
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Raymond Carr pioneered a new way of looking at modern Spanish history, releasing Spaniards form the...
Stalin's Englishman: The Lives of Guy Burgess
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Winner of the St Ermin's Intelligence Book of the Year Award. 'One of the great biographies of...
Strange Intelligence: Memoirs of Naval Secret Service
H.C. Ferraby and Hector C. Bywater
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Hector C. Bywater was perhaps the British secret service's finest agent operating in Germany before...
The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery: The Fourth Charlie Mortdecai Novel
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The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery - the fourth Charlie Mortdecai novel, soon to be a major film...
Lost and Found
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This is the international number 1 bestseller. "Hilarious and devastating. This is a story of loss...
Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940s
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What did it feel like to be a woman living in Paris from 1939 to 1949? These were years of fear,...
ClareR (5721 KP) rated Luckenbooth in Books
Feb 14, 2021
Luckenbooth piqued my interest as soon as I saw the cover photo - and then I read the synopsis. How could it possibly NOT appeal to me? I mean, the devils daughter rows to Edinburgh in a coffin to work for the Minister of Culture. I was hooked. It’s not all about her though. The book is split into three sections, each section revolving around three different characters, and we see glimpses in to their lives. There are people from all walks of life: strippers, spies, maids, a black human rights lawyer with a bone mermaid, drug addicts, poets, a medium. These are all people who live on the edge of society (within No. 10 Luckenbooth Close, anyway!), people who have little - and they live in a tenement that has been cursed by the devils daughter.
The stories seem not to be linked to one another, and their only link is the fact that they all live in the same tenement building. I really enjoyed these snapshots, any one of them could have been longer and I would have enjoyed them just as much. This fed my love of short stories though, and I really liked how reality was mixed with the more supernatural elements.
I will have to dig out my copies of Fagans books The Sunlight Pilgrims and The Panopticon, languishing in my Kindle library - this has really made me want to read her other books.
Many thanks to the publisher for providing me with a copy of this book through NetGalley.
Hazel (2934 KP) rated Slow Burn (Dan Shepherd #17) in Books
Aug 15, 2020
Here we have the topical and very believable and scarily plausible tale of home-grown terrorism, the use of drones as weapons by terrorists, the question of whether to allow jihadi brides to return to the UK and the minor story of Chinese spies. This sounds like a lot but don't be put off, it flows seamlessly and effortlessly and, for me, it feels like an accurate reflection of the life of an MI5 agent having to keep lots of plates in the air at once whilst trying to stop a disaster of epic proportions from happening.
This is an exciting read full of brilliant characters which is hard to put down ... yes I know this is a cliché but absolutely accurate in this instance. There is less of the personal story in this one and more action ... I wonder if this is because the next instalment sees Spider and his son, Liam, team up on an operation? Or is it going to delve into the Chinese intelligence angle? Whatever it is, I for one can't wait, so hurry up Mr Leather and write faster 😀
Many thanks to Hodder & Stoughton and NetGalley for my copy in return for an unbiased and unedited review.
The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War
9.0
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If anyone could be considered a Russian counterpart to the infamous British double-agent Kim Philby,...
Dark Voyage
10.0
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May 1941. At four in the morning, a rust-streaked tramp freighter steams up the Tagus River to...