Triple Cross
Tom Bradby
361 pages
May 13, 2021
Transworld
🕵️♀️🕵️♀️🕵️♀️
This is the last book in a trilogy about British Secret Intelligence Service agent Kate Henderson. I haven’t read the first two (Secret Service & Double Agent) and while I generally hate reading series out of order, other reviews suggested it could work as a stand-alone. I tend to agree – you get enough backstory to understand the characters and what’s going on; if anything, it sounds like this is the weakest of the three, so may have been more of a disappointment if I had read the previous books first. As it was, I enjoyed it as a tense spy thriller but felt the reveal and ending were weak and too obvious. Note this review will contain spoilers for the previous books.
Kate has left the service in disgrace after discovering that her husband Stuart was a Russian mole. Attempting a reconciliation for the sake of her teenage children, she is brought back into the espionage world for one last mission by a Prime Minister desperate to prove his innocence and restore his reputation – uncover the mastermind hiding within the service who is behind the whole conspiracy to undermine him.
I started off quite liking Kate as a character, but her increasing hypocrisy and recklessness towards other people in pursuit of her goal put me off. The book is well paced and the central mystery – who is Dante? – kept me reading, but then it turned out to be the person I suspected all along, for reasons that made little sense – there really weren’t enough other suspects. I didn’t understand Kate’s loyalty to or faith in the PM, perhaps this would’ve made more sense if I had read the earlier books. While it seems that this is supposed to be a trilogy, the ending does leave things open for more adventures, and it would be better if certain arcs were more definitively wrapped up.
3.5 rounded down – I’d certainly consider reading this author again.
3.5 rounded down – I’d certainly consider reading this author again.
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