Secret Service

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Bradby does a good job controlling his narrative and, without ever becoming tedious or heavy-handed, he subtly helps you remember who knows what, who trusts whom and with what information, and how much each person knows. None of the characters, including the PM candidates, is totally candid, nor can MI6 tip its hand by revealing its investigation of them. Not to mention the bureaucratic difficulty that they’ve concealed this investigation from MI5, which by rights should be conducting it. The title, Secret Service, turns out to have multiple meanings. Secret Service is one hell of a spy thriller which makes other espionage fiction look rather lame. Bradby crafts a race-against-time novel with a plot exploring the long-term tensions between Russia and the UK, Russian interference in British elections and the fact that Russian moles and spies will likely have infiltrated many of our important British institutions just as we will have spies in Russia and elsewhere. The plot is scarily realistic and is not beyond the realms of possibility making it all the more terrifying. The fact that Bradby is a former political editor lends authenticity to the narrative and roots it deep in the reality of our current political situation. But honestly, that's your plot, Mr Bradby? Really, you CANNOT be serious with such a blatantly predictable villain. Everything you had that man do was suspicious Mach 5 and everything out of his mouth sounded like Grade A bullshit. It's a fast-paced, easy read which plays perfectly on the fears of both the political establishment and the general population. Moving between rich, vivid locations we follow protagonist Kate who begins a covert investigation into corruption in the top-levels of the UK government but her conflicting loyalties creep into her head rather a lot. It's certainly a high-octane, high-stakes story full of palpable tension which builds and builds beautifully. There are some parallels that can be drawn between some of the cast here and those currently in the real-world political spotlight. I suspect that was intentional on Bradby's part.

Secret Service is an espionage novel featuring Kate, an MI6 agent working the Russia Desk while also trying to manage her marriage and raise her two kids. While her team is working surveilance on the son of an Oligarch, Kate and the team discover that the PM is going to step down, which is something no one at MI6 knew. How did the Russians know this and who told them? Could there be a mole in the British government? One of the many strengths of le Carré's tales is their verisimilitude and this is the weakness of this book. I don't believe in the reality of the settings or the plausibility of the main character. Sadly, the key reveal is not hidden well enough and comes as no great surprise. The manner in which it arrives is too contrived. On the plus side, the writing is not bad and the action, although slow in parts, does keep you reading. The characters themselves, esp Kates superiors, Sir Alan and Ian, are well done. Even the walk on characters are fully rounded and easily recognisable types.A spy thriller where everyone is a suspect and you’re not sure whom to trust – there were times I even questioned the main character. But in addition to being a spy thriller, this is also a story where secret service agent must juggle the demands of both work and home.

When she became a minister, she was very voluble, particularly about the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, which had happened a few years before she joined the Foreign & Commonwealth Office. She took a very tough line, demanding stiffer sanctions and actually getting them imposed on a wider section of the president’s inner circle. … She’s barely spoken publicly about Russia since.”It was like he was waving a red (haha) flag at us the whole time screaming "It's me! I'm Viper! Notice me! Notice me!" It's quite rare to see a novel shoot itself in the foot so badly, but it's been done. (Paul Auster's Mr. Vertigo for example.) Or perhaps, not in the foot, but in the head in this case, because thriller mysteries rarely get dumber than this set up.

What does that say about your hero, Kate Henderson, if we can see that at first glance and she...uh...is she playing along? Or something? Well, pretty much that she's an incompetent idiot. She suspected to the point of being sure, and never told her superiors. Rav died because of her. LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS, KATE! Ah, but women are such dunces when it comes to love, aren't they. So easy to fool them. Emotions, you see! Women and their feelings....sigh...

Books Like Tom Bradby’s Kate Henderson:

Tom Bradby has created Kate Henderson, family woman and chief of the Russia section at MI6. A tip-off leads her and her team to begin a hazardous operation which reveals both possible Russian interference in the appointment of a new Prime Minister, that there may be a Russian agent among the candidates and that someone is leaking secrets to the Russians. The plot moves along quite nicely, the who-can-I-trust stuff is nicely done and Tom Bradby writes pretty well much of the time. It does get a bit clunky in places, and although the dialogue is generally convincing, characters do tend to lapse into pretty stilted speeches rather regularly. Bradby is also no stranger to a cliché, which gets a bit much at times with sentences like, “I’d like to bury my head in the sand, but I need to go home and face the music.” At first, I wasn't too sure I liked that there was so much emphasis on Kate's family life, but in the end, it was for the best, as it gives Kate more depth, more dimension, more challenges than a typical lone wolf agent. In the beginning, I also wondered if the book was part of a series, as some information seemed to be missing. It was not the case, we are told everything in due time, and in fact, it prevented info dumping. Kate is unlike any other spy I had ever seen, yet SECRET SERVICE is very much like the glorious spy stories of old.

TOM BRADBY is a novelist, screenwriter and journalist. He has written nine previous novels, including top-ten bestselling Secret Service, and its two sequels , Double Agent and Triple Cross. The Master of Rain was shortlisted for the Crime Writers Association Steel Dagger for Thriller of the Year, and both The White Russian and The God of Chaos for the CWA Historical Crime Novel of the Year. He adapted his first novel, Shadow Dancer, into a film, the script for which was nominated for Screenplay of the Year in the Evening Standard Film Awards. She continues: ‘They go behind us and around us and beyond us to the people and the country at large, whipping up hostility and division and dissent, their tentacles reaching down a thousand different alleyways.’ Bradby has the talent of a reporter but the heart of a storyteller" — Daily Mail (UK), on The God of Chaos

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Secret Service is a rather timely spy thriller/political intrigue story that puts Russia’s desire for influence in other country’s political elections front and center. Set in the U.K., Kate Henderson and her team are listening to a conversation when they learn that not only is the current minister resigning soon, but that Russia has a very good foothold into who the next prime minister will be. If that wasn’t enough, the team also learns there is a mole amongst the British ranks, code-named Viper, that can assist Russia and help ensure their candidate’s success. Written by Tom Bradby — With a plot that would have seemed far-fetched just a few years ago, Tom Bradby’s latest political thriller feels like it could have been ripped from the headlines. Deception, betrayal and the ethical vulnerability that compromise Western political leaders are here turned into a gripping, all-too-believable tale. Besides this huge responsibility in MI6 and the evident dangers that it carries, Kate also has to juggle her family life and that helps give the novel extra depth - there’s her Civil Servant husband Stuart, her estranged mother Lucy, now in a care home with dementia, and fractious teenagers Fiona and Gus. A Russian agent has come forward with news that the PM has been the victim of the greatest misinformation play in the history of MI6. It’s run out of a special KGB unit that exists for one purpose alone: to process the intelligence from ‘Agent Dante’, a mole right at the heart of MI6 in London. Bradby has the talent of a reporter but the heart of a storyteller.”— Daily Mail on The God of Chaos