Burke and the Lines of Torres Vedras
British officer James Burke and his sergeant-manservant William Brown have been sent to Lisbon to catch spies. These are Portuguese spies betraying their country—and Portugal’s British allies—to the Napoleonic French. In Burke and the Lines of Torres Vedras, Tom Williams’s seventh spy novel detailing Burke’s adventures, the action consists of the bureaucratic maneuvering behind intelligence work. Burke and Brown deal with their indifferent, even hostile, British superiors, and with the anxieties and idle larks of the Portuguese aristocrats as they settle into pursuing the mole they suspect of passing information on the eponymous defensive line to the French. They have the good fortune to recruit a pleasant and talented young Portuguese woman to assist them, and the passages recounting that are among the novel’s most engaging. William Brown is a Jeeves-like delight to read about, too.
Most of the story takes place within the limits of Lisbon over the early fall of 1810; the actual military lines are minor to the main plot. As tends to be true of thrillers and mysteries, James Burke himself remains a steady presence as he goes about his task. Williams succeeds in showing how ordinary and yet thrilling the work of yeoman’s spy-craft is in its close-in, muted way. I picked up this novel hoping for more detail of life in the Napoleonic age, and Williams completely delivered.
