Comparisons with Le Carré are ten a penny in the espionage fiction field, but in Brierley we have a writer who has some of the lean power of the master's earlier books (before he moved firmly into doorstop-sized epics), together with a solid and authentic sense of recent history that makes his tale of paranoia and fear all the more compelling. Starting from a brutal rape in Bucharest as communism collapsed, Brierley's narrative follows Liliana Branoza in her quest for revenge against her attacker, the party official Mincu, a member of Ceaucescu's government now suspected of supplying chemical weapons to the Serbs. Avuncular British agent Royston Cox involves Liliana in his mission to Bucharest - and the moral quicksands threatening everyone involved remind the reader that the days of absolutes of good and evil are no longer to be found in the modern thriller. An adroitly written and sharply characterised piece with a genuinely compelling climax, Brierley's novel is packed with an unselfconscious underpinning of authentic research and detail that never draws attention to itself.
