This is a very clever thriller that blends espionage, murder, personal tragedy and human greed into a potent mix. At the heart, there is a group of rogue British intelligence agents who call themselves The Shadows. While ostensibly going about HM government business, they are running all manner of scams using their diplomatic access, and are earning millions, mostly through drugs. Knowing they need to run a professional business, they have avoided electronic accounting and, instead, employed a North London businessman, Joseph Severin to ‘do the books’. And they are, quite literally, books. Old fashioned accounting ledgers, hand-written and, therefore, utterly untraceable online.

The book begins with Severin being shot dead by a former soldier – ‘Mr Phipps’ –  hired by The Shadows, so how does the book develop? Phipps,as well as getting rid of Severin is supposed to retrieve the ledgers, but plans go awry, and this brings in a group of other characters, including Lottie, a professional pianist, and Sonya, a Russian prostitute. As the leader of The Shadows, Sebastien Grant, struggles to tidy up the mess, a resourceful MI5 officer called Ellerby is closing in on the group.

At the heart of the story is a desperately sad tale. Sonya, one of whose regulars is one of The Shadows, has painful personal problems. Both she and her husband Georgiy were Russian military. She has moved to London to exploit her beauty, while he is back in Russia, looking after their daughter Marusya. But the little girl has a tumour on her spine, that needs specialist surgery in USA for it’s removal. Sonya knows that Georgiy has a drug habit. Her dilemma is not knowing how much of the money she wires home is being spent on Marusya’s care, and how much is being swallowed up by street drug dealers.

The book has a split time frame. It starts on 30th July, when the key event of the novel happens, but then we jump to five days earlier, and follow the build-up to the event. The last part of the book then takes us to the days after 30th July, and the dramatic fallout that ensues. I am not a fan of these constructions, for several reasons, one being that words are said, phone calls are made and things occur in the first section of the book which don’t appear particularly significant as one reads them in real time, but then in the middle section these little occurrences come back to bite us, and pages have to be flicked back to make sense of things. A standout case of this is revealed in the bonus trailer for One Berlin Day, the follow up to this novel. It links crucially to something that happens to Mr Phipps on 30th July, but seemed relatively unimportant given what happened next.

Those reservations aside, this is a spectacularly original thriller which I read in just two sessions. I was genuinely entranced by Lottie, Sonya, Ellerby and even felt some empathy with four of The Shadows. Not Sebastien, of course, as he was beneath contempt. Not sure about Mr Phipps, though. Yes, he has served his country well and, like many rough men who do violent things to keep us safe in our beds, has been shabbily treated by the authorities. That said, what he did on July 30th was truly awful and I couldn’t suppress the wish that I hope he rots in hell for it. One London Day will be published on 22nd January by Allison & Busby.