THE GENEVA TRAP - Stella Rimington

It's always intriguing, who or what will be the next threats that espionage writers can employ in their thrillers. I'm not sure what it says about the world that we live in but there does seem to be no shortage of possible scenarios and nefarious goings-on to occupy the intelligence world. THE GENEVA TRAP is the 7th book in the Liz Carlyle series, and the main plot elements, as you'd expect from a writer with Rimington's background, have a ring of truth and absolutely credibility about them.

Liz is a very strong character. Strong enough to survive this particular reader's tendency to wander around in this series, as there are a few books that I've missed. Most obviously, it's her personal life that I'm behind with, but at no stage did I really get lost or feel at sea. Which was particularly pleasing as there is a sub-plot in THE GENEVA TRAP which involves her mother's partner, his daughter, Liz's own partner, a French commune, and the possibility of armed protest and personal violence.

Not everything, however, worked perfectly, particularly some of the technicalities of computer hacking. Now granted I'm not as technically expert as some around me, but there were elements in the "techy talk" that simply didn't make any sense, and lacked credibility. To the point where I had to give myself a little "it's fiction - get over it" talking to at one point. Nitpicking undoubtedly, but it did make those parts of the book hard to swallow. What wasn't so hard to chew was the spy craft, right down to the surveillance aspects, the not quite as clandestine as required meetings in parks, generational sleeper agents and all the other covert goings on.

There's good pace and action, some very nice twists and turns and a complicated but clever plot that does pull everything together in a believable finale, although that's tempered a little by some very stereotypical villains and the requisite inept upper echelons. But THE GENEVA TRAP, and the whole Liz Carlyle series are very much espionage based thrillers, and despite a few minor quibbles, this was a book that was hard to put down.