SPIES AND LIES: MY RECENT MAY 2025 READING – SIMON MASON, GERALD SEYMOUR, JOHN LAWTON and CHARLES BEAUMONT
Spies, lies and a missing person finder have dominated my recent reading. All are good reads, even if the Gerald Seymour and the John Lawton books have strangely similar cover designs and images!
Charles Beaumont’s A Spy Alone (late 2023) was an outstanding piece of credible espionage fiction that held attention from beginning to end. His new book, A Spy At War (Canelo, 27 March 2025), is just as good, and possibly more darker, as it once more follows former British Intelligence agent Simon Sharman down a very dangerous path.
After the events in A Spy Alone, Sharman is out for revenge, pursuing the assassin of his former colleague across war-torn Ukraine. While back in London, a Russian spy ring at the heart of the British Establishment remains hidden and actively trying to sabotage the West’s support for Ukraine. Meanwhile on the battlefields of the Donbas, Simon may have a chance to locate the assassin, but larger forces are at work and he finds himself sucked into a terrifying shadow conflict between Russia and the West.
A Spy At War is an impressively researched and incredibly prescient book in the way that it scarily foreshadowed some of the recent noise around the Ukrainian conflict following the election of Trump. The descriptions of the war in the Ukraine are grimly convincing and Beaumont uses them to good effect to build the danger for Sharman and the book’s suspense. Some early scene setting and recapping of previous events slows the pace a little in the beginning, but once underway it is a very gripping read that builds to a superb and bloody conclusion.
The war in Ukraine is at the centre of the book and as Beaumont says in the Author’s Note, he hopes that A Spy At War reminds the world of the “heroism of the Ukrainian people … and the importance of their fight for freedom”. It certainly does that, but it is also a very good spy novel that excites, engages attention, and delivers the twists and turns and surprises that readers expect. It also has a credible cast of characters and touches of mild humour, as in this description of a minor royal: “but as long as you kept him away from the younger waitresses he seemed harmless enough.”
An outstanding piece of espionage, and along with David McCluskey’s The Seventh Floor, is one of the best spy novels I have read in the past six months or so.
A Spy At War was released in most places in April 2025.
From the start of his career way back in 1975, with HARRY’S GAME, to his most recent books, Gerald Seymour has always imbrued his novels with uncannily up-to-date plots and concerns. That is continued in his latest, A Duty Of Care (Hodder & Stoughton, April 2025), which shares with A Spy At War a convincing backdrop of Russian wheeling and dealing around the Ukraine conflict.
A Duty Of Care is the fifth entry in Seymour’s series about the nondescript MI5 agent Jonas Merrick. Generally despised and overlooked by his superiors and flasher younger colleagues, and not really forgiven for previously unmasking a Russian spy, Merrick has been banished to the Post Room where he is expected to pass his remaining days. An unexpected approach by a love stricken MI6 agent, however, sets Merrick off on a new mission to free a British prisoner being held in a Russian gulag. The key to the off-the-record plan is the kidnapping of an Albanian courier who holds the secret codes to the dirty money being laundered for members of the Russian elite. The plan is to swap the courier for the prisoner, but things rarely go as planned in the field.
This is another high quality piece of spy fiction by the always reliable Seymour. The pacing is a slow at the beginning as Seymour carefully places his various elements in place, but the tension steadily mounts once the operation gets underway. Probably too much time is spent on describing Merrick’s caravan trip in the early chapters, but it all serves a purpose, and the book does build to a suspenseful and bloody conclusion.
The details and the descriptions of obscure locations in Albania and Russia bristle with authenticity and ground the story in a convincing milieu. The operation itself is credible and interesting, and the foot soldiers on both sides are well crafted and believable. The various acts of quiet heroism give the book a sense of poignancy and there some terrific little vignettes, particularly the early scenes involving the mentally scarred granddaughter of an Albanian gangster. It can be read as a stand-alone novel, but those who are familiar with the earlier Merrick books will probably appreciate it more, especially in respect to the subplot about the female prisoner in the gulag.
As with most of Seymour’s novels, the outcome is never clear until the final moment, which adds greatly to the tension.
An outstanding spy novel for those readers with patience and a love of well executed plots.
A Duty Of Care was released in April 2025.
Rounding out the spy novels is John Lawton’s Smoke And Embers, (Atlantic Monthly/Grove Press, 13 May 2025).
I originally reviewed this book back in January 2025, but thought that I would repost it now as we get closer to the release date.
Packaged as the ninth book in Lawton’s excellent series about Frederick Troy of Scotland Yard’s Murder Squad, Smoke And Embers actually skirts around the edge of the spy genre and only briefly features its titular central character.
In typical Lawton disregard for the progress of the series through the years, Smoke And Embers is set initially back in 1950, not long after the events in A Lily In The Field and well before the occurrences of the most recent Troy novel, Friends and Traitors. The book finds Lawton returning to the years following the end of World War II in Britain and opens with a seemingly inconsequential murder. However, things become more complicated when Chief Inspector Troy learns that his sergeant has been conducting an affair with the known mistress of an infamous London racketeer, Otto Ohnherz. Troy is immediately intrigued by the mysterious origins of Ohnherz’s second-in-command, Jay Fabian, who is a major contributor to all three British political parties and claims to have survived the concentration camps. Yet there is no proof supporting Fabian’s claims and the Intelligence agencies suspect that he is a Russian spy.
It is a good opening, but the book quickly moves onto other concerns and focuses on characters other than Troy. The impact of the War in Europe and Britain is a central concern, and the scenes set during the tail end of the Second World War are very well done and evocative of the devastation of war. The depiction of the Final Solution and the flood of refugees at the end of the war is powerful and the book certainly contains a high level of emotional impact. Minor characters from the Troy and Joe Holderness (Wilderness) series float through the book and add interest for regular readers of the two interlinked series.
I won’t ruin the book by detailing the plot, other than to say that Troy is not a major player in the story, which is basically an intriguing mix of duplicity and reinvention in the aftermath of World War II and the horror of Hitler’s Final Solution. The ending, however, has that typical Lawton surprise factor.
The pacing throughout the book is leisurely, but never boring, as Lawton smoothly adds on layers of intrigue and deception, and fleshes out an interesting collection of characters. With a twisting plotline, crackling dialogue and characteristic humor, Smoke and Embers is, as the publishers say, “an exciting new addition to John Lawton’s masterful canon”. It also has a fascinating Afterword that expounds on the book’s themes and adds some details. A must read for fans of the series, and general aficionados of spy fiction and good writing. It is also a book that rewards a second read.
Smoke and Embers is released in the United Kingdom and the United States around 13 May 2025.
Finally, Simon Mason is in good form with the third book in his Finder Mysteries series, The Woman Who Laughed (Riverrun, 5 June 2025).
The Finder, a former police detective called Talib, is hired by the British police authorities when they have difficult missing person cases that they want reviewed. In the process he has become a respected specialist in finding missing people.
In The Woman Who Laughed, the South Yorkshire Police bring in the Finder when an old missing person case and a more recent murder collide.
In the first months of 2020 there was a spate of murders of black sex workers in northern cities. One of them was Ella Bailey, last seen talking to a man in an alley in Sheffield’s city centre, and although no trace of her was ever found, the punter, Michael Godley, soon confessed to all three murders.
Five years later, as another sex worker is murdered in the same district, the bag Ella had been carrying with her when she went missing reappears, hanging on the door handles of a café. A local vagrant also claims to have seen Ella sitting on a bench in a churchyard near the site of the murder. The Finder is given the difficult task of finding out if there is any link. His search takes him back to the strange days of the pandemic, to talk to those who knew Ella best, such as her wayward girlfriend ‘Loz’, abusive boyfriend Caine Poynton-Smith and her respectable foster-parents still struggling to come to terms with Ella’s life choices and death.
Bit by bit, the Finder pieces together what happened to Ella by carefully interviewing those originally involved in her supposed murder. The plot unfolds at a smooth pace and although there is not much action it always holds interest. Mason carefully brings a diverse cast of characters vividly to life through their words and the backdrop of the more unsavoury parts of Sheffield is nicely evoked. We are also given brief glimpses into the Finder’s background and what happened to him
As with all good crime stories, there are the requisite twists and turns, and the ending produces some well-crafted surprises. The narration is in the form of a report by the Finder on what happened and initially seems a little flat, but as the book progresses it becomes more engaging, and the final pages fly along.
I really enjoyed this low key mystery and thoroughly recommend it.
So four good books that will reward patient readers who like an intelligent plot and a good story.