Safe Return Doubtful

British Fiction – Published 2024

I had to be persuaded to read this, and I am very glad I was.
I have read Harkaway before, Tigerman, which I enjoyed, but was suspicious about him taking on his father’s eponymous hero.

I was pleasantly surprised, and indeed gripped by Harkaway slipping easily into the ten year hiatus between The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, set in 1963, and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, set in 1974.

It begins in London in the spring of 1963, when a Hungarian assassin named Miki Bortnik shows up at a literary agent’s office to kill a man named Laszlo Bánáti, on the instructions from the Thirteenth Directorate (or KGB). But the repentant killer confesses to Bánáti’s assistant, Susanna Gero, that God has told him not to do it. However, Bánáti has disappeared.

Harkaway is faultless in his knowledge of the Cold War, which he is too young to have grown up with. His writing is extremely impressive, every bit as good as his father. This thrilling story will inevitably go on to be adapted for the screen, and, more to look forward to, is that will undoubtably, be a follow up novel.

(I listened to the audiobook across a couple of weeks out on the hill with the dog; wonderfully read by Simon Russell Beale over about eleven hours).

My GoodReads score 4/5