November 2026

Nick Harkaway, aka Nicolas Cornwell, sets us down in the mid 1960s in this, his second re-imagining of the world of British Intelligence during the Cold War years, a world so memorably portrayed in his father’s novels about George Smiley and ‘The Circus’, properly known as MI6. When Bill Haydon, a field operative is shot and wounded in a Helsinki market, George Smiley is told to investigate. Haydon’s companion, a woman called Lara Koski, was killed in the exchange, as was a man who is later identified as Rolan Gusev, a Russian agent. Gusev was due to fly on to America, where he was booked in to stay at The Reconstruction Club, a luxurious Los Angeles establishment regarded by the CIA as a place with strong links to Soviet Russia.

Another Circus operator, Roy Bland, is meanwhile experiencing problems of his own in Leningrad, where he is staying in a health spa. Bland, officially employed in Bulgaria, is one of the more unusual Circus employees. Although highly educated and multilingual, he is of working class origins. He was brought up in east London, where his father was a docker. ‘Control’, the otherwise nameless boss of The Circus, believes that Gusev was on his way to California to make contact with a Russian spy deeply embedded within the American intelligence services, and he is anxious to find out who this person is. Why? Although Britain was still, notionally, an international power, its post – Suez reputation is not good, particularly in the eyes of the Americans.

To use a seasonal metaphor, it is Britain’s autumn, and the trees, with their leaves blasted away by strong winds, are nearly bare. The American CIA are blunt, disruptive and vigorous. They view the inherent caution and subtlety of MI6 as fey and ineffective. Roy Bland, almost by accident has discovered what might be a key to unmasking the American spy, and it is in Leningrad where most of the serious action takes place. Bland is on the verge of applying for Russian citizenship, more through expediency than conviction, because he realises that his high profile defection may give him the opportunity to help Control.

Smiley, meanwhile, is sent to California, ostensibly to attend a conference but, in reality, to discover why Gusev was headed to Los Angeles, and who he was scheduled to meet. Along the way, we rub shoulders with many of Le Carre’s stock characters, such as the fiercely intelligent Connie Sachs and the devious Toby Esterhase. The more vigorous action – shootings, seduction, film negatives hidden in waste pipes and other skullduggery all takes place in Leningrad, but the quiet and persistent wisdom of George Smiley – ostensibly a mere bookkeeper or accounts clerk – which unmasks the traitor.

Finland features tangentially in the narrative, and it is worth remembering its strange place in European history. Having valiantly resisted the Russians in The Winter War, they then cosied up to Hitler, but suffered a savage revenge by Stalin after the war. The title? It originated in England’s Gunpowder Plot. An unidentified participant had the job of accompanying Fawkes on his fatal mission, carrying a shielded flame to be used in an emergency. In modern espionage terms, it has been used to describe a survivor of a busted spy plot, who keeps his or her head down and keeps the faith while the network is being destroyed above their heads. This is not easy reading. The plethora of references to the original books keeps us on our toes, but Harkaway preserves the enigma of the ‘little round man’, the impenetrable and unknowable George Smiley. The Taper Man will be published by Penguin/Viking on 5th November.

It is unfortunate, at least in terms of Amazon searches, that this book shares the name of the 1979 Jack the Ripper/Sherlock Holmes film, but it is a decent read nonetheless. The initial premise is a rather clever hook. We are in Yorkshire and a serial burglar, a predator of grand houses whose owners are on holiday, goes for the obvious stuff like jewellery and antiques, but he has a quirk. He has a growing family, and he always raids his victims’ freezers for the high end stuff he always finds there. Expensive cuts of meat, game and seafood are all welcome at home, but his latest find? Not so much. It is the body of a young woman, wrapped in a carpet. Eventually he does the right thing and makes an anonymous phone call to the police, where the case falls into the lap of DI Mike Nash.

The novel has, almost inevitably these days, a prologue, which involves a trio of high-end kidnappers who have made a good living from kidnapping children of wealthy parents, who pay the ransom for their child’s return. It seems to have worked well, but one of the trio has reservations about the latest operation. In the first chapter proper, we witness the shooting of a man on a remote Yorkshire farm track. Is this connected with the kidnappers? As ever, we have to wait a while before everything is revealed.

The woman in the freezer is found to have died from a bullet wound, and then a third gunshot victim is found, this time in the unlikely location of a pheasant rearing cage on a local estate. For an ostensibly quiet rural area of Yorkshire, there seems to be rather a lot of handguns going off and killing people, and there is a fourth shooting. This time it is of the owner of an open-all-hours convenience store, and the victim has a rather dramatic past. Gunshots continues to resonate around The Dales, and the body of a man is found in a picturesque rental cottage. The discovery, by a Leeds couple, abruptly ends their hopes of a delightful weekend break, but their misfortune seems to draw a line under the convenience store shooting.

This is the twenty-first book of a series that began a quarter of a century ago, but what does Murder By Decree tell us about Mike Nash? He has a Spanish wife, Alondra, and they have two children. Daniel, Nash’s son from his first marriage is away at boarding school, while Lucy is at a local pre-school. Nash used to be an officer with the Metropolitan Police, but moved north after he was traumatised by a particularly horrific serial killer investigation.

Even the most diligent police investigations need a stroke of luck, and here it comes through seventeen year-old Daniel going for a romantic stroll with his girlfriend in a local holiday park. They hear what sounds like a child crying, and what they discover turns the case on its head.

Bill Kitson is the author of the DI Mike Nash thrillers, plus the Eden House Mysteries featuring amateur sleuths Adam Bailey and Eve Samuels. The Cowgill Family Saga is the latest addition, previously published independently, but now all commercially published. He also writes The Greek Island Romances along with several other titles, all published independently in support of a Greek charity for disabled children, ELEPAP. All royalties from these books are paid directly to the charity. Living and working throughout the north of England he is now retired from the finance industry and lives on the east coast, where his writing never stops. He can often be found on a Greek island, staring out to sea, laptop at the ready.

I thoroughly enjoyed this. It is ‘only’ a police procedural, but it is a complex, nuanced and engaging read, with an authentic Yorkshire background. It will be published by Joffe Books on 4th November.