Yesterday's Spy: The fast-paced new suspense thriller from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Secret Service

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Names and countries may differ, but political duplicity seems to be one constant in international affairs. The CIA are conspiring to undermine the government with an impending coup, and there are dark mutterings about opium smuggling. You feel the loss of the main character Harry Tower’s wife passing through details of their love story plus the anguish of losing not only the closeness Harry once had with his both his deceased wife but also his son Sean, to ultimately the horror that Sean’s disappeared in Tehran and Harry struggling to find him, a child he realizes he doesn’t know. As this uneasy trio’s swindles take them from New York high-rises to sixties London, corrupt governments to, finally, the ultimate con in the Middle East, will their luck start to run out? The shah’s brutal, dictatorial regime during the following two decades led directly to the 1979 Iranian Revolution that still echoes in today’s headlines.

His estranged son Sean has gone missing in Tehran after writing a damning article about the involvement of government officials in the opium trade. Sent on what seems like a simple mission, he soon finds himself playing a game where the rules are unknown – and even victory could be fatal. Len Deighton’s devastating novel is a gripping minute-by-minute account of what happens over the next twenty-four hours. While ITN news reader Tom Bradby is best known for his contemporary Kate Henderson trilogy, here he’s delving into the past too. But painful memories and suppressed scandals soon threaten to destroy the carefully-constructed fiction of his life.It will take him from the English suburbs to Berlin, the South of France to Los Angeles and the heart of a maelstrom. However, a year ago his wife committed suicide, and his son went to Tehran as a stringer for the Guardian.

Leonard Cyril Deighton is a British author whose works include cookery books, history and military history, but he is best known for his spy novels, including the series featuring the unnamed Harry Palmer. While the main timeline covers just the few days of the coup there are flashbacks to pre war periods when Harry was a student and meets his future wife in Germany in the prewar days of the Nazi regime and to other periods in his life as he tries to come to terms with his wife's periods of anxiety and depression and eventual suicide which results in the estrangement with Sean. As is typical of spy novels that incorporate a mole, the reader is asked to guess the mole’s identity.Readers with an interest in the setting may find it interesting, although if you already know the history, as I did, it's a little tedious. Harry Tower is an old spy and finds out his son, Sean, has gone missing after writing an expose about government corruption. I found the writing a little dry and did not connect well with any of the characters, but they were from a different era with different lifestyles and attitudes. Peter and Paul, the two sons of German businessman Harald Winter, are bonded together by a childhood trauma. Young Cambridge student Amanda James gets on the wrong side of a drunken and bellicose Nazi gang toasting the glories of new Reich.

I did my normal 100 pages but there are so many wonderful books in the world that I cannot continue.

The titular spy of the novel is Harry Towers, recently retired from MI5, a widower ready to put the past behind him. Wanted for an act of treachery he has not committed, he must not only escape the grasp of London Central, but get to the bottom of a tangled conspiracy that is about to change everything. Lacking a British public school pedigree, he knew he would always be regarded as an outsider by the SIS. Amid the turmoil, three very different people – a doctor, a young firebrand and an educated revolutionary – find themselves thrown together and trapped at the heart of a battle where the enemy is uncertain, and there can be no winners. A very good spy thriller, almost a throw back to the old Eric Ambler stories, though Harry is more of a seasoned professional rather than a lucky amateur.

And in the early stages of the Cold War, British and American interests are prepared to prop up the Shah’s regime as a block against Soviet expansion in the region.I'd only recently found out about Goodreads giveaways and spammed a bunch and this was the one I won. Harry understandably blames himself but wishes he could do more for Sean, who wants nothing that Harry tries to give him.