Thanks to Arcadia Books for sending us a copy of this title, for review purposes...
Review by Declan Madden.
William Catesby , SIS agent ,operates in a world where no
one or nothing is as it seems to be. Tasked with discovering the source of
leaked classified files concerning nuclear weaponry, he finds himself
questioning who exactly he should be investigating.
Lady Penelope Somers is the first female to head up the
Ministry of Defence. Wealthy and powerful but also with something to hide, it
falls to Catesby to find the secret and bury it.
The Whitehall Mandarin is set in the Cold War era spanning
over a decade from the mid fifties to the late sixties and is a real classic
spy story. The action moves from London to Moscow and eventually the conflict
in Vietnam with various stops along the way. The main character, William
Catesby, works in a world of double-cross and counter-bluff where every person
is suspected of spying, either for the Soviet KGB or the new rising power that
is China. China’s rapid ascent to world super power poses serious questions to
both the British secret services and the KGB as to how it acquired the ability
to manufacture its own nuclear weaponry so quickly. A trip to Moscow for
Catesby ends up leading to a search across South East Asia during the Vietnam
war for the daughter of Lady Somers and the secret she has hidden for years.
Edward Wilson has written a cracker of a story here. He has
set the story in the height of the Cold Ward crisis and used real time events
as background to the events occurring in the novel. From the Bay of Pigs crisis
through to the Profumo Scandal, Philby, Burgess and Maclean and the Vietnam War
there is a definite sense of reality through the pages. The action takes place
over a number of years and builds up to a dramatic ending with the writing
well-paced. The character of Catesby is well developed and we see an outsider
looking in at the peculiarities of the upper-class English who dominate
officialdom and how their hedonism allows for them to be recruited by foreign
espionage agents. It’s a clever story with plenty of twists and fans of classic
spy novels by Le Carre will certainly enjoy this work.
The Whitehall Mandarin is published by Arcadia Books and is now available in paperback and ebook format.
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