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Paul Tallis, billed on the cover as a rival to both Bond and Bourne, is asked by MI6 to venture into dangerous territory in Chechnya to find and bring back a missing undercover agent, Graham Darke, who is believed to have gone rogue and could well be involved in a plot to assassinate the Russian prime minister. To complicate matters further, Tallis and Darke were boyhood friends. To succeed, Tallis has to infiltrate the same rebel group as Darke, and to survive, he has to rely on his instincts to distinguish friend from foe. To an extent, this story has more in common with a quest narrative than it does with a spy thriller. Before embarking on his mission, Tallis has to improve his grasp of the Chechnyan language, and to do that he has to convince someone living as an illegal immigrant to help him. And as a result of this the book collects a side-narrative involving Tallis' search for the missing son of the woman who has helped him. Seymour states in her introduction that she has never visited the area she is writing about, but in spite of that the narrative is relatively convincing in its details, although having gone to the trouble of supposedly improving his language skills enough to pass as a native, Tallis never seems to actually make use of this accomplishment, which seems rather a waste of effort on the part of the author. As a main character, I'm not convinced Tallis lives up to the billing he gets on the blurb, but he was a serviceable hero and the narrative held up reasonably well, although I was struck my how easily Tallis manages to find a needle in the proverbial haystack. Once would probably have been all right, but twice was stretching credibility. I would like to have seen more character development for both Tallis and the mysterious Graham Darke as at the end, I was really no wiser about what made either man tick. But, having said that, Tallis was interesting enough that I'll probably seek him out again. § Linda Wilson is a writer, and retired solicitor, with an interest in archaeology and cave art, who now divides her time between England and France.
Reviewed by Linda Wilson, January 2011
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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