Traitor's Kiss

Officially the Cold War is over. Between former enemies, the hand of friendship is exchanged in public. In private though, the intelligence war goes on...

An English trawler strays into Russian waters. When it returns, the captain has a package to deliver to British intelligence. For the next four years a high-ranked Russian naval officer, Viktor Archenko, passes valuable information to MI6. Suddenly the flow of information stops. His contacts in London know nothing about him but they know that he s under suspicion. The time has come to get him out. But a new breed plays the spy game now: men like Gabriel Locke. They have no interest in irrelevant Cold War sparring or the risk of a scandal. Only one veteran agent realizes that there is much more at stake than one man s life. With this latest tale of intrigue from perhaps today s preeminent writer of espionage fiction, readers are faced with a novelistic world that is as duplicitous, subtle, and as terrifyingly immediate as the headlines the world could wake up to tomorrow morning.

**

From BooklistHighly placed Russian spy Victor Archenko fails to make his scheduled dead drop, and MI6, preoccupied with Islamic terrorism and -twenty-first-century cyber-espionage, is prepared to cut loose this embarrassing throwback to a bygone era. Despite pragmatic protestations from neophyte Gabriel Locke, the agency is shamed by eloquent cold warrior Rupert Mowbray into a possibly ill-advised attempt to exfiltrate their man from the heavily fortified Baltic outpost of Kaliningrad with the aid of four disgraced and deniable frogmen. As the Russian's top inquisitor closes in on his prey, readers can only hope that this last-ditch effort, code-named "havoc," will echo the glory of Henry V rather than the futility of Hamlet, exposing what is mortal and unsure to all that death and danger dare, even for an eggshell. Seymour's genius is for dropping captivatingly flawed characters into taut adventures fraught with tragic heroism, resulting in an elegiac escapism on a par with le Carre and Greene. Such mastery, together with a well-researched and original milieu, ensures that although this is not Seymour's very best, it's far better than most. David Wright

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Review

"The finest thriller writer in the world today." -- "Daily Telegraph

"A clever, informed and worldly cynical story about arrogance, obsession and tragedy." -- "The Times