Review | A Spy in the Blood by Paul Warner

There is something immediately familiar about the premise of A Spy in the Blood.

Think The Night Agent, but instead of sitting in a basement waiting for a phone to ring, former MI6 operative Mark Wolfe has been moved behind a desk, recruiting the next generation of agents.

Then his daughter disappears.

Suddenly Wolfe is no longer watching the action from a safe distance. He is back in the middle of it, relying on instincts he hasn’t had to use in years and discovering that the intelligence world has moved on while he sat behind that desk.

That is where the book works best. Wolfe is not the young, slick spy who always seems to know what comes next. He has experience, but he is older, rusty, and at times a little out of step with the technology and methods now surrounding him. It gives the story a slightly different edge from the usual intelligence thriller.

His daughter’s disappearance also gives the plot a reason to move quickly. This is not a mission handed down by MI6 or some abstract threat to national security. Wolfe is going because he has to.

From there, A Spy in the Blood settles into more familiar thriller territory, moving from London into Afghanistan as Wolfe tries to work out what has happened and who he can trust.

At times, credibility gets stretched, particularly once the action really starts to build, and some later sequences feel more conventional than the opening suggests.

But it is still a very easy book to keep reading. Paul Warner keeps the pace moving; there is enough character behind the action to make Wolfe interesting, and the father-daughter relationship gives the story more weight than a straightforward spy mission.

A Spy in the Blood may not reinvent the espionage thriller, but it does enough differently to make Wolfe a character worth following.

A good debut, a good holiday read or gift, and I would happily pick up the next one.