‘The Spy Who Haunted Me’ – Simon Green (Gollancz)

If you’ve been following the blog right from the start (brilliant if you have, I’d have jumped in around the early part of 2008 though... ;o) then you’ll know that one of the first books I ever reviewed was Simon Green’s ‘The Man with the Golden Torc’. If you haven’t been following the blog right from the start then here’s a link to the review if you fancy having a look.

Simon Green is one of those authors where I really enjoy his work, when I pick it up, but never seem to get round to reading the rest of his series. It’s funny how that happens but there’s only so much time to read so many books I guess... For me, the ‘Deathstalker’ series came to a grinding halt with ‘Deathstalker Honour’ (although that was more about trying to track the other books down) and the one ‘Nightside’ book that I tried looked very interesting but I somehow never got round to finishing it. ‘The Secret Histories’ (of which ‘The Spy Who Haunted Me’ is the third book) is no exception to this rule as I seem to have found myself reading the first and third books while completely bypassing the second! I’m going to have to do something about that very soon if ‘The Spy Who Haunted Me’ is anything to go by though. On finishing the book I felt like I hadn’t had so much fun in a long time...

The Independent Agent (greatest spy in the world) is dying and wants an heir to leave all his secrets to. These secrets aren’t easily earned though, the six greatest spies in the world must solve the six greatest mysteries in the world if they are to stand any chance of inheriting a lifetime’s worth of knowledge that governments would kill for. Eddie Drood (‘Shaman Bond’ to those who don’t know any better) knows the damage that these secrets could do and his family, the guardians of humanity no less, have tasked him with winning the Independent Agent’s game at any cost. In a game such as this, the wise man keeps one eye on the rest of the players and the other eye on their own back, just to make sure that a knife doesn’t suddenly appear there. When the other agents start dying though, Eddie can’t help but wonder if he’s been tricked into playing another game entirely...

I’m going to come straight out and say that I’d managed to guess the ‘final twist’ by about halfway through the book and a quick flick to the back of the book proved my theory to be true. It was signposted pretty clearly, by my reckoning, and I reckon you’ll see it coming too. I don’t know if this was a deliberate move on Green’s part but it did have the unfortunate effect of dumping a whole load of tension from the ending of the book. If you’ve worked out the twist, and you know just what Eddie is capable of, then you can almost write the ending yourself. I say ‘almost’ as there was a little spin, on the otherwise predictable ending, that suggested the Independent Agent didn’t know as much as he thought he did...

The thing was though; even though I’d worked out the ending I didn’t stop reading. For me, ‘The Spy Who Haunted Me’ became a book that wasn’t so much about the ending as it was the journey that it took to get there. What a journey it was!

If a page goes by where there isn’t an explosion, sinister looking monster, conspiracy theory or blatant example of male machismo then it’s clear that Simon Green counts this as a failure on his part and seeks to redress the balance by doubling the quota in the very next page. The end result is a lot of fun as Green takes various mysteries and puts his own spin on them to give you answers that you would never have seen coming. What was the real cause of the Tunguska Incident? What really happened to the US naval ship during the Philadelphia Experiment? And is what happened at Roswell as important as what might be about to happen if Eddie can’t stop it...? One thing you can be sure of is that there will be something happening on every page and it’s all powered by energy that you don’t come across very often in a novel. It certainly picks you up and carries you along before you realise what is happening.

‘The Spy Who Haunted Me’ doesn’t do a lot else other than come out with all guns blazing (although Green does have a nice sideline in Eddie questioning the morals of his superiors) and, as a result, perhaps isn’t the book for people who like their reads to be deep and something that they can chew on. I didn’t have a problem with that though. ‘The Spy Who Haunted Me’ doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is, namely a light read that sets out to entertain the reader in the short time that it takes to work through the book. As far as I was concerned, ‘The Spy’ more than succeeded in this aim. Any book that has me wanting to go back and fill in the gaps has to be doing something right!

‘The Spy Who Haunted Me’ is perhaps a little too transparent to be a truly engrossing read but makes up for this by having a plot that rockets along; powered by explosions and the machinations of eldritch creatures. If only more Urban Fantasy was like this...

Nine out of Ten