Triple Cross: The unputdownable, race-against-time thriller from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Secret Service

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Starting in the year 1990, he began working for ITN, producer of ITV News when he joined as an editorial trainee. After that, he became producer for ITV’s political editor Michael Brunson in 1992. So Kate once again enters the murky world of Intelligence and the games within games. Finding the mole becomes a priority and a quest that could cost her everything, including the family she lives… Secret Service is a fresh-from-the-headlines thriller for fans of Homeland, Crisis and The Bodyguard. Tom Bradby is an awesome story teller, with his obvious knowledge and research all things ‘spy’ become accessible to us and he tells a incluisve, easy to read yet thorough and immersive story

Overall, then, I have to say this: I will be sad to see Kate Henderson go. I have thoroughly enjoyed reading her journey as a human and as a spy trying to uncover the truth of a massive Russian disinformation campaign, but Triple Cross is Tom Bradby at his best: pushing down on the action accelerator while peppering the journey with enough sentimentality and plot twists to carry the reader along with him. All I do know is that Bradby captures in Kate Henderson a psychological complexity based in raw honesty – and that’s an asset to any character, let alone a top MI6 spy character. We all have flaws, and we all want comfort. But sometimes old comfort isn’t really comforting at all. Bradby captures the tensions of this, and the importance of trust, in Triple Cross, and the novel is all the better for it. As I wrote previously these books are closer to George Smiley’s world to that of James Bond. There is still plenty of action along with the kind of twists and revelations that are integral to well written espionage fiction.Secret Service" and "Double Agent", the previous installments in the Kate Henderson series, were great reads. They were fast-paced, cerebral at times, and were thrilling from start to end. But "Triple Cross", the latest installment, is underwhelming, to say the least, and doesn't resemble in any way the previous books. Trying to preserve what little progress has been made with her family, off Kate goes. Everything seems to be falling into place for her, pushing her in certain directions, a little too neatly. Is she being set up to reach a false conclusion? Is she being set up to take the fall as a Russian mole? Can she play the Russians into letting her husband go? Kate has a lot of masters, a lot of information, and she's playing several dangerous games at once, as she tries to close this chapter once and for all. In the year 1994, he married Claudia, Vice-Admiral Hon. Sir Nicholas Hill-Norton’s daughter. The couple have three children.

A Russian agent has come forward with news that the PM has been the victim of the greatest misinformation play in the history of MI6. It’s run out of a special KGB unit that exists for one purpose alone: to process the intelligence from ‘Agent Dante’, a mole right at the heart of MI6 in London. Attempting to rebuild her shattered life in the South of France, former MI6 operative Kate Henderson receives an unexpected and most unwelcome visit from an old adversary: the UK Prime Minister. He has an extraordinary story to tell – and he needs her help. The brutal murder of Sarah Ford and the disappearance of her six-year-old daughter, Alice, shattered the rural serenity of Julia Havilland's childhood. But these are not the only scars that have resolutely refused to heal. Shortly afterwards, Colonel Mitchell Havilland sacrificed himself on a Falklands hillside in an act of characteristic - but baffling - heroism. When Julia comes home from China fifteen years later, it is to a place of ghosts.While he starts peering through the glittering surface and into the murky depths underneath, Field glimpses a world beyond the glamour of the expatriate life in the city. A world where it all has its price, and human life is just another asset to barter. Kate's most recent mission has yielded the startling intelligence that the British Prime Minister has cancer - and that one of the leading candidates to replace him may be a Russian agent of influence. The plot is to find the mole or is it a rat the twist will leave you guessing all the way through and the suspension is there all the way through as well. Its hard to put down like the others have been but I think this ones the best or is it that I've just read it whatever the answer it was a fantastic read.

The Master of Ruin” is the third stand alone novel and was released in the year 2002. Shanghai in the year 1926. A city of American gun-runners, British Imperial civil servants, Chinese gangsters, and Russian princesses, where everything is for sale and heroin is available on room service. Sexually liberated, exotic, and pulsing with life, it is a time and place where it all seems possible. The recurring theme is that the British Prime Minister might be a Russian spy and that there may be a high level mole in the U.K. intelligence service. The character of Kate is just terrific. She’s honest, brave and whip smart. First and foremost, Kate wants to do the right thing, but in the murky world of 21st century espionage it is not always clear what that is. If any of you are missing the Cold War espionage novels of the 1970s and 1980s, this series is for you.”– Deadly Pleasures, on Double Agent

Summary

I would thoroughly recommend all 3 books. It is difficult to be objective when you have immersed yourself from start to finish but I’m not sure how well this would be as a stand alone. I think suffice to say - it wouldn’t be as enjoyable and you would have missed 2 excellent reads that go before - so start at the beginning and strap yourself in for the ride. While the story is finally resolved in this one and the identity of the Russian mole inside the British Intelligence Services is finally revealed, there's nothing happening in this entire novel at all. It's pretty meandering and boring, with characters who act contrary to what has been established in the previous installments. Kate, for example, doesn't resemble the bright, intelligent agent she was before, as the author, for some baffling reason, opted to portray her as a clueless, frightened, rookie agent. Kate is a wonderful protagonist to take this journey with as the books unfold. We agonise over her problematic parent, her unresolved relationship with the father of her kids and see the dangers for her returning to this secret and manipulative world where others may be looking to set her up as a scapegoat. Tom’s debut novel, called “Shadow Dancer”, was released in the year 1998. He writes mystery and thriller novels. Kate Henderson is a fully envisioned character, driven, brave and loyal at the heart of Britain’s secret service.