Jamie Tulloch, following his experiences in A Reluctant Spy, has decided to join MI6, but one doesn’t become a spy overnight. Months of intensive training follow in all manners of spycraft, followed by a qualifying exercise – a spy game where you compete against your fellow candidates to secure targets across the UK while avoiding capture – Exercise Red Poacher.

On the other side of the game are MI5 recruits, including former lawyer Sam Li, tracking the MI6 trainees without knowledge of their targets, genuine military installations with genuine military secrets.

But the problem with this game is that there’s a third player – a player that isn’t playing by the rules and that, worse, nobody else knows is playing…

I admired A Reluctant Spy a lot, but it didn’t quite click with me for whatever reason. However, one of the reasons that I read it, besides its reputation and being impressed by David Goodman at Stockport Noir, was that I had a review e-copy of this one lined up. So I thought I’d give it a go. You know, read a few chapters, see how it went…

And after a slightly ropey run of books, I found myself carrying my kindle around with me, snatching a chapter or two in any spare time that I had. First time in ages.

I can’t put my finger on what the difference was between this book and the first was – what exactly it was that gripped me from the start. But the most important thing was that it did.

It’s really tense thriller, as we follow both the hunters and the hunted (and some other interested parties) and there’s ongoing questions as to where the danger is coming from, what the danger is, whether Jamie has what it takes to be a spy and so on. The returning characters from the first book all get their time in the spotlight, and it seems like it had more of an effect on me than I thought, being pleased when they appeared for the first time, curious as to how they were going to fit in.

The escalation works really well with, I thought, a nice twist in direction once Jamie is captured by the third party. The threat keeps building and building, while still keeping into a level of reality – this isn’t James Bond with a mad supervillain, but it’s also not some dull genuine real-world threat either.

So if you’re in a market for a spy-thriller, this one is well worth your time. Excellent work, and I’m looking forward to where it goes next in Book Three.

Solitary Agents is out now from Headline in hardback and e-book. Many thanks for the review e-copy.