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This is a love story because it’s about Harry and Amanda and Sean and Shahnaz. Amanda committed suicide and Bradby blends her story into the relationship between father and son very skilfully. Can Harry not only find Sean but reconcile with him about the family’s past? Both this and the spy story work. Kinsey Millhone, the P.I. created by Sue Grafton, is seen reading Len Deighton novels in many of her books. I had heard about Deighton, the movie Ipcress File was based on his novel of the same name. So, when I saw this book in a second hand book stall I bought it promptly. But, sadly, what followed was a mediocre read. I suppose no pigeon fancied them, when just a short flight away, the tourists would be throwing them croissants, and they could sit down and eat with a view of Saint James Park.” It’s all very confusing . . . until it isn’t. And you’re unlikely to expect how Bradby resolves it all.
A man in search of his son. An agent on the run from his past. A country on the verge of revolution... Yesterday’s Spy opens in a bierkeller in Gottingen, Germany in 1933. Young Cambridge student Amanda James gets on the wrong side of a drunken and bellicose Nazi gang toasting the glories of new Reich. If not for the intervention of fellow Brit Harry Tower things could get very nasty for Amanda. Curiously, the whole time the conflict is happening Harry has the feeling a man is watching him, assessing his actions. In the coming years, Harry marries Amanda, they have a son, Sean, and Harry begins working for SIS. The 1953 Iranian coup was one of the seminal events of the 20th century. Its importance is under-appreciated in the US. And accounts of that time tend to focus on the CIA. Even MI6, whose collaboration with the Americans was indispensable, is often overlooked. So is the Soviet involvement. Tom Bradby's cold war thriller features a British spy called Harry Tower, who dashes to Iran in search of his son Sean, a journalist who has gone missing. The tale is set mostly in 1953 at the time of an Iranian coup d'état, in which the British and American governments were attempting to overthrow the democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister, Mohammed Mosaddegh (who was left leaning) in favour of the Shah. [They were of course successful and the Shah ruled as absolute monarch with American support until 1979 when he was deposed in the Islamic revolution].My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Grove Atlantic for an advanced copy of this new historical spy story.
His wife has recently died and his relationship with his son, Sean, is strained. In August 1953 Harry receives news that Sean has gone missing in troubled Iran after writing an exposé about government corruption. He travels to Tehran to search of his son and needs to draw on all his skills to survive.
The spy thriller is often a runaway train of an adventure where agents need to think on their feet and improvise. This is at odds with the world of espionage where the less charismatic and forgettable players are, the best suited to engage in double dealing and subterfuge, they would be. All the characters are very well crafted as is the storyline. There really is something for everyone, the intrigue you would expect in a Spy Thriller, plenty of action as Shahnaz finds out that Harry really is pretty handy in tight situations, guilt and introspection from Harry all too aware of the people he has hurt in his lifetime plus a ringside view of what a coup d'etat is like in the middle of 1950's Tehran.
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