She needs to rest and recharge but work comes first, especially at a time of national emergency and the biggest spy exposé since “Kim” Philby. Double Agent is his follow up to the highly addictive and intelligent international spy thriller, Secret Service, although it could be read as a stand-alone. I found the two aspects distracted from each other rather than enhanced the book and I struggled a bit as a result.

There again begins an operation to determine the veracity of this and we get more office and political manoeuvring, Kate putting herself in danger again and so on. From that point onward, Kate oscillates between mental and familial crises at home and her need to convince her government to accept Borodin's deal at work. It’s all pretty well done and Tom Bradby knows a lot about what he is writing about here – perhaps to the point of overdoing the detail at times.In many ways this was like a ‘tying up loose ends’ from the previous book and was good to be back with Senior MI6’s Kate and the gang as they once again tried to unravel fact from fiction as to whether the PM was indeed a Russian spy!

The narrator, soon established as Elliot Chase, then zooms out to address the reader directly, introducing the players—most importantly movie star Lana Farrar. We are arguably now entering a new Cold War, with tensions between East and West at its ever increasing height. He has been with ITN for thirty years and was successively Ireland Correspondent, Political Correspondent, Asia Correspondent (during which time he was shot and seriously injured whilst Covering a riot in Jakarta), Royal Correspondent, UK Editor and Political Editor- a job he held for a decade - before being made the Anchor of News at Ten in 2015. Double Agent is a more pacier spy novel than its predecessor, and there are some well-written and suspenseful set-pieces on the way to the taut climax. Those coming new to the series by ITV News at Ten anchor Tom Bradby, will find enough of the history to make it understandable without being burdened with too much backstory.

The allegations are explosive: agreement to the resettlement suggests that they could be true, while a refusal could come later to look like cowardice or worse. Its the type of book that is full of action and it takes you on a breathtaking ride from England to Venice and Russia. Kate is at the centre of things throughout, and comes across as some variety of super-mum, juggling a family and career with added combat skills, facility with languages, and generally being the saviour of Western civilisation.

These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. As she works through the case, Kate runs up against key people at the heart of the British Establishment who refuse to acknowledge the reality in front of them. In exchange he offers Kate conclusive evidence to prove the identity of a live Russian agent at the very heart of the British Government. Kate and the rest of the small MI6 circle concerned are trying to recover after the events of last time.Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. But while John le Carré's had his readers’ equally confused with double agents, Tom Bradby offers us a mole in MI6 but also the possibility the PM is a Russian agent too. Then there are those who rely on cardboard stereotypes of spies and opposing ideologies, with their often reductive tropes of good vs evil.

We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006). Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.If Spy Thrillers have to be dark mazes of corruption and confusion then Tom Bradby has delivered a classic. This would have been an absurd storyline in the context of the immediate zeitgeist of post-Soviet Russia. The novel starts off with a murder, and with seven people trapped on an isolated Greek island lashed by a "wild, unpredictable Greek wind. S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Such is the world of secret operations within a political regime while a totalitarian state will always have an advantage.