I've joined in a Summer Of Spies theme on booklikes.com. My first effort, "Real Tigers" was with a tried and trusted favourite and I enjoyed my third Slough House story immensely.

Then I decided to try something new. I picked "The Traitor's Story" because it's about British spies but it's set in Lausanne, a city I know well.

The first disappointment was the narrator: Simon Vance. Yes, I know he's an award-winning narrator, but I found his plumy Brit accent irritating, especially as he delivered the story with all the vocal range and passion of Gregorian Chant. He also sounded too old for the main character in the book. Still, his delivery was new-reader clear and unhalting so I decided to try and tune him out and let the book stand on its text.

The text itself was the next disappointment. The prose is sparse without being lean: functional in that put-me-out-of-my-misery-and-give-me-the-movie version sort of way. There where many exotic European locations, most of which I know well and yet there was almost no sense of place. The characterisation ranged from the cute (which means bad things are bound to happen to them) to the dispassionate (which might even be appropriate given that the main character is a hollow, desiccated man whose only distinguishing characteristics seem to be emotional withdrawal and a willingness to kill). I quickly realised that I didn't really care what happened to any of these people.

For a while, I thought the plot might come to the rescue as it ran two timelines in parallel which suggested that we were heading for an interesting convergence at some point. The plot was well constructed but completely unsurprising. In fact, the only surprising thing about this book was that the main character has been able to afford to live in Lausanne for six years of the proceeds of writing a few popular history books.

The final confrontation between the bad guy and the slightly less bad guy who was the Traitor of the title summed up my feelings about the book. The hero looks at the destruction he has wrought and asks

"But what was the point of final words between them? What had been the point of any of it?"

Sadly, the book lumbered on for another couple of chapters to wrap up loose ends I no longer cared about and to make a belated and unsuccessful effort to convince me that our hero might still have a chance of living a worthwhile life.

I'm done with Kevin Wignall and Simon Vance.

On the off chance that you can hear something in Simon Vance's performance that I missed, you can click on the SoundCloud link below to play a sample.

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Surprised Me

I started and stopped this book twice. The beginning was really slow, but I couldn't find anything else I wanted to read, so I came back to it. Very glad I did because it was very good. ( )

I may have been influenced by some personal bias here (see below for that) but this seemed extremely weak in terms of engaging characters and plot. Ex-spy Finn Harrington (the supposed "traitor" of the title) searches for the runaway daughter of a neighbour due to her possible connection to his past which turns out to be a story of how he rescued a possible sex-trafficked teenager from an Estonian mob figure in Tallinn during his espionage days. It all seemed pretty thin and not very dramatic.

After leaving his espionage career behind Harrington is a historical non-fiction writer and keeps explaining to anyone who will listen that his next book is about the Albigensian Crusade and the persecuted Cathar sect in early 13th century France (the original use of the expression "Kill them all, God will know his own," supposedly said by the Papal legate). That story seemed much more interesting than the one he was investigating.

I'll confess to an Estonian bias here: The villain Karasek has a name previously completely unknown to me in any Estonian context, but he is definitely described as "the Estonian" who "spoke Estonian." Tallinn, Estonia is the setting for the pre-story here but there isn't anything specifically described that leaves any impression of detailed research having taken place. So all of that left a weak impression on me. I realize that it won't matter to others. ( )

This was superior to Wignall's last book, A Death in Sweden, but still didn't have the action punch of his earlier novels. I enjoyed the various mysteries throughout the book, but there needed to be more backstory in some areas and, frankly, there was a bit too much of a Hollywood ending, in almost every way imaginable. This book gets ( )