Usual well written, gripping stuff ( )

Little suspense and few thrills characterise this largely unremarkable spy novel that entertained me for about four hours but is unlikely to be remembered in a year's time. Written and set in the mid 1980s, it reflects its time but the writing is often clumsy and many of the characters are caricatures. I suspect that, after some twenty years of writing bestsellers, Forbes overawed his editor and was allowed to sprawl; why else would he be allowed to describe a distance in clumsy tautological terms of 'walking paces', for example? ( )

NIL