This one looked right up my street. Fantastic cover. Arctic setting. An out break of a virus. Heck we even have a gruesome death in the opening pages. Here we go I thought.

Not so unfortunately. Despite being about a potential outbreak of a deadly virus, not a lot actually happens. There are lots of meetings, lots of acronyms that have to be explained (which became extremely tedious), an agent that must be the most incompetent agent that ever existed, making one stupid decision after another and a story that never fulfilled its opening set up and promise.

The dialogue is extremely cheesy at times, there’s a romantic side story shoe horned in that feels extremely clumsy and the whole thing was just extremely underwhelming.

A shame. It has some good ideas but the direction chosen by the author and the poor writing overall made this a no no for me unfortunately.

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC

My first Frank Gardner! I did seem to read it all in his voice I'm afraid but as most of it was pretty serious stuff it kind of worked. I need to read the rest of the Luke Carlton books but I liked the fact that he's portrayed as an M16 agent with flaws and doubts unlike many main characters in the spy genre. Bizarrely I'm still enjoying epidemic scenarios in fiction despite lockdown. A strong four stars and my oh my that ending!!

Ok, this appealed to me, not just as a theme but also because of the authors background., The theme for obvious reasons is becoming more common, pandemic, plague, world in mortal danger. There also seems to be an increase in novels being set or having locations in the desolate regions of Antarctica, Siberia etc. This one brings Luke to the far northern reaches of Norway, close to the Russian border. Someone has caught the lurgy and all the fans begin to be hit by excrement around the world. I had not read either of the two previous books in this series, and I didn't feel I had missed out. I enjoyed the British element to it in terms of the spy craft, but in one sense it seemed to have a mixed persona of British intelligence. The upper echelons of Spy Power still had people named "C" and Luke got his fancy gadgets from "Q", all very traditionally old school. However, when an Op went live, we were transported to a intelligence service similar to Bourne, with abilities to do all sorts of chicanery. Frank Gardner, the author is a security correspondent for the BBC, who has been there and seen it all, at great personal cost, so his inner workings of this stuff and Government, brought a knowledgeable expertise to the plot. There is more to come, as there remains questions to be answered.