Sea of Spies (The Richard Prince Thrillers Book 2)
This is another in a series of spy novels revolving around Richard Prince, a police officer seconded to British Intelligence. He has recently returned from a long dangerous mission in Nazi Germany, but there is no time to rest. The British desperately need to prove that chromium, an essential material for war industries, is being smuggled into the Third Reich from neutral Turkey. To make matters worse, his only son has gone missing.
This is a nicely crafted tale of espionage that goes into great detail of how agents are trained and operate. The social geography is also formidable – you get a really good feel for the various places Prince journeys to: Istanbul, Prague, Cairo. Unfortunately, Prince doesn’t actually do very much, and what he does attempt is uniformly disastrous. It is largely the various useful people who he very fortunately meets up with who carry the plot, so much so that I came to wonder why SOE bothered to send Prince. It would have been far better to use the various resistance groups to find out what they needed to know! There are other niggles. The sub-plot of missing children is an irrelevance that doesn’t achieve much. There’s no real urgency to the story and no mention at all of what was happening elsewhere at the time. I was getting the feeling that the war might end before Prince gets the information!
