Tom Bradby

A nearly perfect mystery/thriller set in Russia in the days just before the 1917 revolution. (And while I certainly didn't time it this way intentionally, it was interesting to note that I finished the book on the day before Bloody Sunday, a famous date from the earlier 1905 Russian revolution.) As was the case with his earlier THE MASTER OF RAIN and its treatment of 1920s Shanghai, Bradby is so good at writing every scene here that I was thoroughly enveloped by the atmosphere that he show more created.

It begins with the discovery of two murder victims, found on the frozen Neva River of St. Petersburg soon after midnight of New Year's Day in 1917. And as the story's protagonist, the city's Chief Investigator, makes his way across the snow and ice to the crime scene, the writing is already so good that it was easy to feel that I was walking alongside him in the quiet cold of that time and place. As the investigation delves into the mystery of why the couple was there and what led to their deaths, the plot and subplots play out almost flawlessly within a fascinating historical context. Add a host of richly multi-layered characters, excellent dialogue and at least two doomed love affairs and you have another home run from a writer who has secured a spot on my don't-miss list. show less

I started The Master of Rain by Tom Bradby a few weeks ago expecting a good noir-style mystery set in an exotic place. I got so much more. The Master of Rain does read like it could be filmed in black and white; it's filled with men in suits wearing fedoras and smoking, there's a beautiful woman with secrets and a hero feeling his way through treachery and intrigue, but at heart it's a dense historic novel.

It took me only a few pages in to realize how very little I knew about Shanghai in the show more 1920s. It was a big Chinese city, but at the centre lay an area controlled by American and British Commercial interests, called the International Settlement, bordered on one side by the French Settlement and surrounded by a China in turmoil as Mao's forces destabilize the country and leave plenty of room for criminal forces to take control of the Chinese parts of Shanghai. The city is also flooded with Russian refugees in the wake of the Russian Revolution.

Into this comes Field, a Yorkshireman hired as a policeman and assigned to the special forces, that is, to the political branch of the police. Immediately, he is called out, with an American cop, to the scene of a murder; a Russian woman found brutally slain in an apartment block owned by the Chinese mob boss who controls much of the city. And so begins a fast-paced and complex story that swings from the upper echelons of expat society to the desperate world of emigre Russians trying to survive in a hostile city. show less

This is a brilliant spy novel with an outstanding protagonist.

Britain's MI6 honcho Kate Henderson takes her teenage children to Venice to visit their self-confessed Russian spy father Simon. He now lives in exile in Moscow. While there she is lured away to meet with a Russian spymaster who presents an almost too good to be true offer. He is on the losing side of a power struggle in the Russian intelligence apparatus, facing imminent arrest or worse. His offer to Kate: he (and his family) show more will defect to Britain with conclusive evidence that the current British prime minister is a Russian mole. They want safe sanctuary in return.

This is an excellent sequel to the author's "Secret Service" which introduces Kate and spins the backstory to this one. It's a slick and brisk spy yarn story: full of red herrings and blind alleys. There's an undercurrent of infighting at the top of the British government and within MI6. Kate's ambitious boss is desperate for the top job at MI6 as the current head faces his wife's terminal illness. All of this has Kate travelling incognito into Russia in order to confirm the Russian's story. Kate dominates the story as she deals with the Russian defection. At the same time, she faces family problems of her own: her dementia-challenged mother and her teenaged children cut adrift by the loss of their father. Her own sanity is under stress attack by too little sleep due to insomnia. The suspense is intense as the story peters out to an oddly abrupt ending following an explosive denouement. It leaves this reader wondering whether there will be a follow-up. I hope so.

I received a complementary advanced reading copy of the eBook for review from the publisher Atlantic Monthly Press via Netgalley. The comments about it are my own. show less

Kate Henderson is a senior officer in MI6, and has even been tipped by C, the current Head of Service, as a possible successor to him. As the book opens, she is engaged in ‘recruiting’ Lena, a young Serbian woman, to act as an agent on a high-level operation being mounted against the family of a Russian oligarch with extensive and powerful contacts. At first everything seems to go well, and the operation garners what seems to be some devastating intelligence, suggesting that a mole has show more penetrated the higher levels of the British establishment – not merely within the intelligence community but right to the top levels of government.

However, the operation suddenly goes wrong in the most dramatic manner, and Kate and her colleagues are left wondering whether any of the information they have garnered can be relied upon. They are in a fraught dilemma, not knowing whether to proceed on the basis of what they have learned, and risk everything backfiring in the most damaging way, or to leave things as they are, not knowing whether all the country’s gravest secrets are completely compromised.

Tom Bradby focuses on keeping the plot moving, rather than laborious development of his characters. That is not, however, to say that his characters are two-dimensional. Kate is a well drawn figure, constantly striving for some semblance of work-life balance, managing the demands of two teenage children and a fractured relationship with her ageing mother. Her husband is also a high flyer, working in the Private Office of the Secretary of State for Education. I worked briefly in that office myself, and I was impressed by how closely Tom Bradby caught the internal politics that bedevil such a role, and the constantly fluctuating relationship between ministers and officials.

Bradby is not a viable challenger for John le Carré’s throne – he does not attempt the same exploration of the vagaries of the human condition – but he is quite definitely a writer of engaging and gripping spy stories. show less