Intrigue and double-dealing in wartime
FINISTERRE by Graham Hurley (Head of Zeus £18.99)
BETTER known for his excellent police procedurals featuring DI Joe Faraday and DS Jimmy Suttle, Hurley is also an accomplished author of stand-alone thrillers, and this is one of his finest.
It is September 1944 and the Third Reich is in retreat around the world when the highly respected 24-year-old U-Boat commander Captain Stefan Portisch sets out from Kiel to convey a group of SS officers and a mysterious cargo to Lisbon.
The plan goes wrong when the submarine develops a fault and is wrecked on the rocks of Spain’s northern coast.
At the same time in Los Alamos, New Mexico, the Americans are secretly finishing their plans for the atomic bomb, which they have nicknamed ‘The Gadget’.
One of the men working there is an FBI agent, Hector Gomez, planted to keep an eye on the scientists, some of whom have their roots in Germany.
As the plot unfolds, the two stories coalesce when Portisch finds himself on the trail of a German scientist working for the Americans.
Beautifully constructed, the result is compelling and richly entertaining.
THE MARRIAGE LIE by Kimberly Belle (HQ £7.99)
THIS delicious, serpentine thriller starts from a simple premise: what if your husband was not who you thought he was.
Iris Griffith, a teacher in Atlanta, is forced to ask herself that question when her husband Will is killed in a plane crash.
The trouble is that he had told her he was going to Orlando in Florida for a conference, while the plane in which he crashed was on its way to quite a different city: Seattle in Washington.
Iris cannot bring herself to believe it. Surely her perfect husband would never have lied to her? There must be some mistake.
She sets out for Seattle to find out what Will could have been going there for, and in doing so begins to unearth her husband’s true life story, which is very different from the one he had told her, involving a distinctly criminal past and a possible involvement in arson.
As the story starts to unwind, so the twists and turns in Will’s life become ever more complicated, as it also turns out he may have embezzled money from his company.
A good, old-fashioned pageturner, with a poisonous sting in the tail.
THE REYKJAVIK ASSIGNMENT by Adam LeBor (Head of Zeus £18.99)
A THIRD outing for LeBor’s glamorous, intrepid, covert United Nations negotiator Yael Azoulay sees her brokering a secret meeting between America’s female President, Renee Freshwater, and the first female Iranian president at a global conference held in Iceland.
The two women aim to bring an end to violence in the Middle East. However, not everyone is anxious that their meeting should succeed.
Powerful forces are at work to bring down the first woman U. S. president, not least because, by doing so, they will increase the profits of their international corporations.
Add in a people-trafficking ring with links to Washington and you have the complex tapestry behind a fascinating geopolitical thriller that draws on LeBor’s 25 years of experience working for the international media.
The shark pools inside the Washington Beltway are deftly drawn — as are the implications of ever y diplomatic move.
This fast-moving, refreshingly intelligent story is packed with insider knowledge, and brings the world of international politics all too frighteningly to life.