Want to Read: “Jack of Spies” by David Downing (Old Street)

A twist on the “Upcoming” posts that I frequently write, I’m going to start posting a few more of these – looking at novels that are already out that I really want to read. Some of these will be recently-released books that I just happened to miss, but I’ll also be featuring older titles that I’ve only just stumbled across, or have been meaning to read for years.

I’ve never read anything by David Downing, and I’m not really sure why. It is probably just down to the fact that I get so many books these days that, if it doesn’t arrive in the post, or isn’t from an established series that I’ve been following for some time, I often just can’t get around to it. David Downing, however, I have been aware of (he is the author of the Station series of spy novels), just never had the money to buy the books when I was reminded of them. Jack Of Spies may just change this. It is the first in a new World War I espionage series, and it sounds really good:

Jack McColl is a globe-trotting salesman for a luxury car firm. He is also a part-time spy for the fledgling Secret Service on the eve of the First World War, doing London’s bidding wherever internal or external enemies threaten the security of the British Empire. As 1913 ends he is in China, checking out the German naval base at Tsingtao between automobile demonstrations in Peking and Shanghai. Caitlin Hanley is a young Irish-American journalist with the sort of views that most British men would find dangerously advanced. McColl is no exception, but once captivated he finds himself unwilling to give her up – even when Caitlin's radical politics and family connections threaten to compromise his undeclared career as a spy. Then the pair become involved in a plot that threatens the Empire in its hour of greatest need...

I’m very intrigued by this. Anyone read it? Also, how great is that cover?

“Judge Dredd: Year One - City Fathers” by Matthew Smith (Abaddon)

An eNovella Introduction to Mega City’s finest

The Making of the Lawman...

Mega-City One, 2080. It is Joe Dredd’s first year as a full-eagle Judge – he may have been created from the genes of Eustace Fargo, the ‘Father of Justice’, and thus part of an illustrious lineage, but right now Dredd is not long graduated from the Academy, and yet to establish himself as the metropolis’s toughest, greatest cop. His reputation will be moulded in the years ahead, but at the moment he’s a young lawman, fresh on the streets.

The brutal murder of a Justice Department-sanctioned spy sparks an investigation that will see Dredd trawl the criminal underworld in the hunt for the killer – and he will discover that all is not what it seems in the sector's murky black market. Something new has entered the system, and unless Dredd can stop it, chaos will be unleashed...

This novella, which was released just before the new Dredd movie hit cinemas, is a great story of Mega City’s most bad-ass of cops. Set in his first year, it serves as both introduction and refresher course, for new readers and lapsed enthusiasts (the latter including yours truly). I really enjoyed this story, and I hope there are more on the way. City Fathers is a great dystopian sci-fi crime thriller.

“The Coldest War” by Ian Tregillis (Tor)

The second book in the Milkweed Triptych

A precarious balance of power maintains the peace between Britain and the USSR. For decades, Britain’s warlocks have been all that stands between the British Empire and the Soviet Union – a vast domain stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the shores of the English Channel. Now, someone is killing the warlocks, and Britain’s national security is threatened.

Meanwhile, a brother and sister escape from a top-secret facility deep behind the Iron Curtain. Once subjects of a twisted Nazi experiment to imbue ordinary people with superhuman abilities, then prisoners of war in the immense Soviet research effort to reverse-engineer the Nazi technology, they head for England.

Because that’s where former spy Raybould Marsh lives. And Gretel, the mad seer, has plans for him.

As Marsh is once again drawn into the world of Milkweed, he discovers that Britain’s darkest acts didn’t end with the war. And while he strives to protect queen and country, he is forced to confront his own willingness to accept victory at any cost.

A few months ago, I finally got around to reading Ian Tregillis’s superb debut novel, Bitter Seeds. Luckily, the sequel was already out in the US, and I was very happy to get my hands on it so soon after finishing the first book. The Coldest War builds brilliantly on Bitter Seeds – it’s darker, tighter, and utterly engrossing. Easily a contender for best novel of 2012.

[Warning: Some spoilers, though I have kept this review short to avoid too many. Proceed with caution.]

Upcoming: RASPUTIN’S BASTARDS by David Nickle

I stumbled across this novel by accident, when Madeleine Ashby mentioned it in an interview answer for CR (sorry, you’ll have to wait until next Wednesday to read the interview…). Naturally, my first reaction was to Google the book, and I found its great cover artwork:

The novel will be published in June 2012 by ChiZine, and after reading the synopsis (below), my interest has definitely been piqued:

They were the beautiful dreamers. From a hidden city deep in the Ural mountains, they walked the world as the coldest of Cold Warriors, under the command of the Kremlin and under the power of their own expansive minds. They slipped into the minds of Russia’s enemies with diabolical ease, and drove their human puppets to murder, and worse. They moved as Gods. And as Gods, they might have remade the world. But like the mad holy man Rasputin, who destroyed Russia through his own powerful influence in the end, the psychic spies for the Motherland were only in it for themselves.

It is the 1990s. The Cold War is long finished. In a remote Labrador fishing village, an old woman known only as Babushka foresees her ending through the harbour ice, in the giant eye of a dying kraken – and vows to have none of it. Beaten insensible and cast adrift in a life raft, ex-KGB agent Alexei Kilodovich is dragged to the deck of a ship full of criminals, and with them he will embark on a journey that will change everything he knows about himself. And from a suite in an unseen hotel in the heart of Manhattan, an old warrior named Kolyokov sets out with an open heart, to gather together the youngest members of his immense, and immensely talented, family. They are more beautiful, and more terrible, than any who came before them. They are Rasputin’s bastards. And they will remake the world.

Rasputin’s Bastard is available for pre-order from Amazon in the US (paperback and Kindling) and in the UK (paperback and Kindling).

“The Trinity Six”, by Charles Cumming (Harper Collins)

Spies, Cold War politics, and one unsuspecting history professor caught in the middle…

London, 1992. Late one night, Edward Crane, 76, is declared dead at a London hospital. An obituary describes him only as a ‘resourceful career diplomat’. But Crane was much more than that – and the circumstances surrounding his death are far from what they seem.

Fifteen years later, academic Sam Gaddis needs money. When a journalist friend asks for his help researching a sixth member of the notorious Trinity spy ring, Gaddis knows that she’s onto a story that could turn his fortunes around. But within hours the journalist is dead, apparently from a heart attack.

Taking over her investigation, Gaddis trails a man who claims to know the truth about Edward Crane. Europe still echoes with decades of deadly disinformation on both sides of the Iron Curtain. And as Gaddis follows a series of leads across the continent, he approaches a shocking revelation – one which will rock the foundations of politics from London to Moscow…

This is the second novel by Charles Cumming I’ve read, and both have been superb in every way: prose, plot, pace, and characterisation – Cumming really knows how to write. The Trinity Six harkens back to the glory years of Cold War espionage thrillers, but with a contemporary feel and a historian’s perspective. From the very beginning, I was utterly riveted by this thriller, and loved every minute I was reading it.