Best new thrillers — double trouble for Bond fans, Russian finger-pointing and a mafia kidnap plot

Two years on, and James Bond is back. I had mixed feelings about Kim Sherwood’s 2022 Bond revival Double or Nothing, which was finely crafted but felt somewhat unreal. Bond’s appetites for sex and spine-stiffening cocktails would doubtless preclude him working for today’s Secret Intelligence Service (perhaps that’s why he was absent). I also feel ambivalent about the sequel, A Spy Like Me (HarperCollins £16.99, William Morrow $30). I won’t spoil things by revealing if Bond finally emerges.

Sherwood, an award-winning novelist, has a very modern take on Ian Fleming’s creation. The story, told from multiple points of view over the course of the action, begins with a bang as terrorists blow up the BBC then moves at whip-crack speed as the 00 team race around the world to stop the next attack; there’s plenty of action and snappy dialogue woven between the tradecraft.

It’s a fun read, and the cast is definitely bedding down, but the fast pace and sometimes scattergun structure hinder character development or a more thought-provoking narrative. The best spy novelists, such David McCloskey and Charles Cumming — and Ian Fleming himself — deepen our understanding of the world while telling an enthralling story. Sherwood is not quite there yet.

The British novelist Phyllis Bottome is almost forgotten, but Bond fans owe her a debt. Together with her husband, a former spy, Bottome ran a private school in the Austrian Alps; one of her students in the late 1920s was the young Ian Fleming. According to the espionage historian Nigel West, James Bond was originally based on Mark Chalmers, the hero of Bottome’s 1946 spy thriller The Lifeline (Muswell Press, £10.99), now reissued.

Chalmers is recruited by “B”, head of British intelligence, and parachuted into Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938. Chalmers, a master at Eton, has dark hair, is an excellent climber and skier, is fluent in French and German, and is a connoisseur of fine food and women. Sound familiar? Decades later, The Lifeline is still a cracking read. Top marks to Muswell Press for bringing the book back. 

Ben Creed’s Man of Bones (Mountain Leopard Press, £22) is the third outing for Revel Rossel, the disgraced Russian militia detective. It’s 1953 in Leningrad and a man and a woman have been deliberately killed. Freshly released from the Siberian gulag, Rossel is forced to work with the sinister state security officer Major Nikitin, who once cut off two of Rossel’s fingers, to solve the case. Meanwhile, Stalin is preparing to move against Russia’s Jews. Creed is a pseudonym for Chris Rickaby and Barney Thompson. They conjure up Stalinist Russia with evocative detail, from the greasy meat stew in a worker’s cafeteria to the lung-burning smoke of a papirosa cigarette — and the dread and menace that permeate everyday life. 

The English Midlands in the 1930s might seem less intriguing, but Natalie Marlow more than rises to the occasion in The Red Hollow (Baskerville, £16.99), which sees the welcome return of private detective William Garrett and his new partner, the lesbian Phyll Hall. Phyll’s brother Freddy is being treated at Red Hollow Hall, a sanatorium, but patients are fleeing after a series of disturbing and inexplicable events. Marlow has a poetic eye: a road “glittered like polished pewter in the morning light”; inside a church, “motes of dust danced in the warm glow of lamplight”. But it’s her mix of detective story and Gothic ghosts, ancient folk legends and lingering wartime trauma, that lift the book. 

Finally, two sharply observed tales of not-so-innocents abroad. Second Skin (Muswell Press, £16.99) is the follow up to Dugald Bruce-Lockhart’s much-praised debut, 2020’s The Lizard. Set five years later in 1994, our hero Alistair Haston is back in Greece. The good news is that he has just discovered he is father to a son, Max, with his former girlfriend Amara. The bad news is an international mafia gang is planning to kidnap the boy. Working with Britain’s SIS and Greek intelligence agents, Haston is an engaging protagonist, veering between klutzy everyman, protective father and impressively competent operative. The smells, tastes and surrounds of Greece — and most of all, Haston’s simmering desire for Amara — rise off the pages like the heat on a midday beach.

Meanwhile, The Many Lies of Veronica Hawkins (Constable, £20) unfolds in a sticky, humid Hong Kong. Martina Torres is a newly arrived American journalist with a boorish banker husband. Veronica Hawkins, a leading light of the island’s elite, guides Martina through the social minefield of expatriate life, where even teacups and business cards must be presented correctly — until she falls over the side of a yacht and dies. Kristina Pérez crafts an engaging tale of intrigue, glamour and hyper-status conscious expatriates, laced with claustrophobic menace and mystery. 

Adam LeBor is the author of ‘Dohany Street’, a Budapest noir crime thriller

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