Sally Page is a “footie”, a junior-level MI5 employee whose job is to maintain buildings and cover stories for real spies’ fake identities. Her job is fairly uneventful until the day she returns from a coffee run to find her colleagues murdered. Sally goes on the run when she finds herself to be the next target. No one at MI5 can tell her anything and she doesn’t know who to trust. The race is on for Sally to figure out what the bad guys were after before they catch her.
I stayed up way too late reading this book, trying to figure out what was going to happen. Stephen Leather is a new author to me but he has written a number of books and I can easily see myself reading more of his writing.
This story is action-packed and fast-paced. There are a lot of chapters but they are fairly short which kept the momentum going. I really enjoyed this writing style and I found myself thinking “Just one chapter more,” and kept turning the pages.
I liked the character of Sally and I’m wondering if the author will have her show up in future novels. She is smart and thinks quick on her feet. I do wish that her character had a little bit more substance. We don’t know much about her other than she is a runner, which does get put to a lot of use in this book. However, now that I think about it, this book is so fast-paced that I think if the author threw in more of Sally’s background or additional exposition, that it would just bog down the story.
Sally finds herself suspecting that there is a traitor in MI5 as the bad guys always seem to be one step ahead of her. There are a lot of red herrings as to who the traitor is and they kept me guessing. There was one character though, that I was suspicious of throughout the whole novel.
There were only a couple of things in this book that let me down. The synopsis makes it seem like Sally uses a bunch of false identities to help her hide and in my opinion, she didn’t really do that. I guess I had visions of her using fake names and credit cards and wearing wigs and adopting all these different personas to escape the bad guys. I also thought the ending was super rushed. The action ends and then there are about two pages of wrapping everything up. It just seemed kind of abrupt.
I really liked this book and will be checking out more written by this author.
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