A Spy Alone

‘Ware the warlords of our modern times!

Slow start to what becomes a rather compelling story of international intrigue, based mainly on Russian oligarch connections.
Simon Sharmon is our key player, an ex Oxford man, ex intelligence officer who’s operating freelance now.
An acquaintance, Marcus Peebles, employs Simon to look into a mid level oligarch Georgy Sidorov, with reference to an endowerment to Sharmon’s Oxford College, especially at this time of the war in Ukraine.
The action switches between Simon’s Oxford student days, the late nineties and early 2000’s to the mid 2000’s—from Ukraine and Crimea, to the present.
By the end I’m feeling totally paranoid, haunted by the vision of a net of various intelligence agents and show more investigators from a variety of countries crisscrossing the United Kingdom like one of those diagrams of millions of interconnecting internet webs. Only to my mind they’re spiders webs spinning out of control in the underbelly of our world. Grrr! But who or what’s at the center?
Brexit comes in for a drubbing. Apparently forces were at work to make it happen, leaving Europe vulnerable and open to being ravaged by the Russian Bear. Or is it just the oligarchs and powerful corporations hiding their activities behind various shell companies? If I wasn’t paranoid before with the rise of populism, the spread of international drug lords, human trafficking, the craziness of Putin and his cronies, Britain isolating itself—then I am now. I could be wearing an al foil hat soon!
The question of was there an Oxford spy ring to equal the Cambridge fifties one of Blunt et.al. resonates and Simon’s investigations uncover so much more. Simon’s digging opens up a minefield of boggling possibilities.
An exciting thriller, seemly all too accurate, that left me breathless in its magnitude.
The fact that it’s written by an ex intelligence officer sends cold shivers down my spine.
Beaumont’s certainly up there with my favorite spy writers. The mind games of Le Carré are recalled.

A Canelo ARC via NetGalley.
Many thanks to the author and publisher. show less

By setting this book in the present time but having an older, now working privately, spy as the protaganist, you get the best of both modern and old-time spy work in this book. OSINT is used, Open source intelligence, plus pass-by drops all in one story that goes backwards and forwards between 2022 and 1993.

When old spies meet in shabby pubs to lament the state of the modern world, one of the things they say is that nobody learns the old skills. Anti-surveillance, counter-surveillance, it's all been forgotten. These days, its all done by tracking your phone, those little beacons we all carry with us, shining out to any of the world's intelligence agencies.
p1

The spy, Simon Sharman, is asked to investigate a Russian who wants to donate show more money to a university and the university doesn't want to be involved in dirty money. Sharman looks into the Russian but not everything is as it seems. It very soon turns into a much larger investigation into the heart of whether there was a spy ring at Oxford and if so, where are they now. A little problematic for Sharman who was present at Oxford during the time this was all going on.

It turns out that the UK via the prime minister is about to do a deal with Russia, through oligarchs, to develop a large data cable so the book follows a theme of the way Russian money is so deeply embedded in our economy: property in London; investments in infrastructure and general spending power. Very relevant.

I loved some of the detail. For instance, when Sharman is followed he looks at the shoes of the people around him to spot when the shoes reappear. Those tracking him changed their clothing but not their shoes and so he was able to find the people who were 'boxing' him in as they tracked him.

It is their shoes that give them away. As a lifelong fieldman, Simon Sharman hasn't forgotten the lesson: walkers might change their jackets, pull on a pair of glasses, even a wig. But nobody changes their shoes on a job. Look at their shoes.
p1

A great book that I read in two sittings. I enjoyed it much more than the short stories. show less

I received a copy of this novel from the publisher via NetGalley.

Simon, a former spy, is employed to investigate a Russian oligarch who apparently wants to make a substantial donation to an Oxford college, but in doing so, he uncovers evidence that a Russian spy ring may have been active at Oxford for decades. I enjoyed this and read it quickly, although there was quite a lot of complex information about Russia and Ukraine and economics and politics and history (sometimes helpfully explained by one character to another) and some of this went a bit over my head.

I thought the author did a good job of keeping the reader unsure of who Simon could trust. I loved the parts set in Oxford and the mention of my old college, and enjoyed all the show more spycraft - I'm always going to look at the shoes of people I think might be following me from now on. I found it flowed much better once the flashbacks were over and we were settled in 2022. I didn't really buy into the attraction Simon and Sarah were apparently feeling for one another and I found the ending depressing, although I am sure it was realistic. show less

I don´t get all the good reviews, either on the cover of the book nor on this site. This book had me seriously contemplating not finishing it, and that is a very rare event for me. Eventually, I stuck with it in the hope that the author would finally get the hang of writing as he progressed with his first novel, but no. It feels like it has been written by a teenager. Clichéd cardboard cutout characters, clichéd prose, a plot that looks like it borrowed from every Guardian-reading conspiracy theorist´s fantasies and a rather pathetic main protagonist suffering a major bout of middle-aged puppy love (if that´s possible). Seriously, I don´t get the good reviews.

Very good, much in the feel of early LeCarre rather than Slow Horses as billed.

Disillusioned former British agent pulled back in to a conspiracy at the highest levels of government and on the run. My kind of story.

4.5