One grisly morning, the body of MI6 analyst Stephen Garrick is found dead inside a suitcase, an impossible assassination carried out while he was working from his impenetrable apartment.
It will take the very best to crack the case. And in a genre as traditionally testosterone-filled as the spy thriller, it’s marvellous to learn that the best is a woman.
A young woman called Emma Makepeace (only she’s not really called Emma Makepeace, of course, pseudonyms abound in this world). Makepeace works for a service so secret it doesn’t even have a name, and when it comes to her commitment to tracking down the baddies and saving the world, she could give a certain Double O agent a run for his money.
The corpse in the suitcase is the tip of the iceberg. It turns out Garrick was looking into sales of particularly unpleasant weapons – and the trail leads Makepeace to a shady Russian oligarch who happens to live for the majority of the year on a luxurious superyacht.
Most of the action of The Traitor takes place on board the yacht, where she must go undercover, working as a deckhand (a lowly job OO7 would have lasted all of five minutes in, let’s face it) getting close to the oligarch and his entourage, and sniffing out who’s involved in the weapons dealing.
Even more risky, Makepeace must also find the inside man who’s helping them – the eponymous traitor.
What follows is a sun-soaked glamour-fest of an adventure, on the yacht and its luxurious destinations.
But the road to saving the world never did run smooth. Makepeace is highly trained and highly competent, but refreshingly flawed.
She’s no superhero, and we do worry about her as she dices with death on what seems like a daily basis.
As The Traitor races to its denouement, we root all the more for Makepeace because she feels like a real person as well as a secret agent.
Shake yourself a martini over ice, put your feet up, cling onto the last of the summer, and enjoy.
