‘This is espionage storytelling of the highest quality’: The best Thrillers for January –
The Seventh Floor by David McCloskey (Swift Press £20, 400pp)
Former CIA analyst McCloskey has quickly established himself as one of the world’s finest spy novelists, and this, his third outing, proves just how outstanding he is.
There is a mole in the top echelons of the CIA – based on the seventh floor of the Agency’s headquarters in Langley.
McCloskey recruits the leading characters from his previous two novels, Artemis Proctor from Moscow X and Sam Joseph from Damascus Station, to go off grid to try and track down the traitor.
The story pays tribute to John le Carré’s masterful Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but is less cerebral and more grounded in modern tradecraft. But the parallel is utterly justified. This is espionage storytelling of the highest quality – written with the experience of someone who has been there and done it.
Famous Last Words by Gillian McAllister (Michael Joseph £16.99, 416pp)
Absolutely out of the blue, ghost writer Luke Deschamps, father of baby Polly and husband of his literary agent Camilla, takes three hostages in a warehouse siege, which results in two being shot in the head.
Luke disappears into thin air. But why? What on earth prompted this easy-going family man to turn into a killer? His wife Camilla has no idea, and neither, for that matter, do the Met police. So begins the gifted McAllister’s latest stay-up-all-night thriller, which positively rushes off the page and into the imagination.
Seven years pass, and the hostage negotiator at the siege – Niall – is still haunted by the events. Is it possible that Luke is still alive? Camilla is on the brink of declaring him dead when events suddenly take a string of very surprising turns. It is mesmerising.
Notes on a Drowning by Anna Sharpe (Orion £18.99, 304pp)
Two women with secrets – Kat, a special political adviser to the Home Secretary, and Alex, a criminal defence lawyer – investigate the disappearance of a Moldovan teenager dragged from the Thames. It seems she drowned, but nothing in this story is as it seems.
Both women have chequered pasts and their search for the truth about what happened to the teenager takes them to a private club off Piccadilly, where attractive young women entertain much older men.
Kat begins to suspect that her political master may somehow be involved as he knows the immensely rich Max Peterson, who might be trafficking the girls.
This is a neat, rather old-fashioned political thriller with two fine female protagonists and a sharp sense of the realities of power in modern Britain.