It is 50 years since John Le Carré published , an extraordinary novel of cold war realpolitik driven by a plot with more twists than a high diver. deserves to stand alongside his best work - and more importantly has an audiobook read by Le Carré himself. His austere but sensitively cut-glass tones suit the elegant, detailed concision of his prose like a tailor-made suit: "Like much else in the room, the bathrobe, too short for his long legs, reeked of stale cigarette smoke and lavender air freshener." Set in part on Gibraltar, the classic Le Carré plot to arrest a terrorist is derailed - or possibly not - by counter-plots. For Toby Bell, private secretary to the British foreign minister, untangling fact from fiction boils down to a moral decision where doing the right thing becomes a matter of national security. Le Carré struggles slightly with some of the dialogue - he is not at his strongest, for example, when rendering the enigmatic Emily Probyn. But these are quibbles about a really fine, enjoyable novel.
is part two of a new series by David Baldacci, the master of the conspiracy thriller and sentences that sound silly after a macho fashion but for some reason aren't: "Feeling energised by the death that was about to happen, Doug Jacobs adjusted his headset and brightened his computer screen." Jacobs' contact will later ask if he is "cocked and locked?" which makes that opening sound like Shakespeare. Will Robie is an assassin who kills bad guys for supposedly good governments: here, he is asked to take out Jessica Reel, a former colleague (read: killer). By "take out", I don't mean dinner and dancing. Reel has killed the wrong dictator. The government suspects she is a double agent and sends Robie after her. As ever in Baldacci, not everything is as it seems. Ron McLarty brings a surprisingly light tone to his narration, which robs Robie of some musculature but makes the story trip by. Orlagh Cassidy's breathier reading injects some mystery and urgency into Reel. The emotional punch of the end is surprisingly effective.
