feather_ghyll (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
feather_ghyll) wrote2021-10-16 02:06 pm
feather_ghyll) wrote2021-10-16 02:06 pm
OVERVIEW: Breaking Cover
I have posted about a couple of Stella Rimington’s Liz Carlyle books in the past, so I thought I’d discuss the latest one I’ve read here, 'Breaking Cover'. I’d normally pick these spy thrillers up at a charity shop if they came my way and have managed to read the series in order so far, and having read this one, I have no intention of putting much effort into getting the next in the series.
The first chapter involves a woman being mugged and rescued (or is it ‘rescued’?), which made me deeply uneasy because I was reading it the weekend after Sarah Everard’s murderer had been sentenced and details of his vile crime had come out. But it soon settled into more familiar territory, with the POV mainly split between series regulars Liz Carlyle and her deputy Peggy Kingsolving of M15, and the woman we met in the opening chapter, Jasminder Kapoor, a civil rights lawyer and academic who’s making a name for herself.
Liz may be grieving after the loss of her boyfriend Martin, but it still seems that Every Single Man who works with her fancies her or has in the past. She’s now working counter-espionage cases, supposedly lighter duty than counter-terrorism, after her bereavement. Peggy is increasingly stressed because her boyfriend Tim seems to progressed from reading The Guardian to visiting online chat rooms airing all manner of grumbles about state infringement into privacy. Rimington could have done more with this being a reaction to Peggy’s job and the fact that she can’t and doesn’t tell him much about it. Early on in the story, he drags her to a lecture by Jasminer, who Peggy finds more reasonable than she expected and strikes up a friendship with.
Rimington is not bad on the way women think about their work, but I wasn’t convinced by her depiction of middle-aged and younger Londoners in the mid 2010s. There were bafflingly dated references to the EC or the way Jasminder understood the Fahrenheit scale. And while I’m at it, another thing the ghost writer or editor might have wanted to look again at was American operative Miles’s dialogue. I know he’s described as an Anglophile, but surely not to the extent of using such British turns of phrases.
The action, as a source tips the Americans and Brits off about a potential threat, is deeply unsurprising, and it involves one character in particular being so naive, and indeed stupid, that I’d scoff at every time they’re described as intelligent if my belief in the character wasn’t super strained already. Basically, it’s not very good.
The first chapter involves a woman being mugged and rescued (or is it ‘rescued’?), which made me deeply uneasy because I was reading it the weekend after Sarah Everard’s murderer had been sentenced and details of his vile crime had come out. But it soon settled into more familiar territory, with the POV mainly split between series regulars Liz Carlyle and her deputy Peggy Kingsolving of M15, and the woman we met in the opening chapter, Jasminder Kapoor, a civil rights lawyer and academic who’s making a name for herself.
Liz may be grieving after the loss of her boyfriend Martin, but it still seems that Every Single Man who works with her fancies her or has in the past. She’s now working counter-espionage cases, supposedly lighter duty than counter-terrorism, after her bereavement. Peggy is increasingly stressed because her boyfriend Tim seems to progressed from reading The Guardian to visiting online chat rooms airing all manner of grumbles about state infringement into privacy. Rimington could have done more with this being a reaction to Peggy’s job and the fact that she can’t and doesn’t tell him much about it. Early on in the story, he drags her to a lecture by Jasminer, who Peggy finds more reasonable than she expected and strikes up a friendship with.
Rimington is not bad on the way women think about their work, but I wasn’t convinced by her depiction of middle-aged and younger Londoners in the mid 2010s. There were bafflingly dated references to the EC or the way Jasminder understood the Fahrenheit scale. And while I’m at it, another thing the ghost writer or editor might have wanted to look again at was American operative Miles’s dialogue. I know he’s described as an Anglophile, but surely not to the extent of using such British turns of phrases.
The action, as a source tips the Americans and Brits off about a potential threat, is deeply unsurprising, and it involves one character in particular being so naive, and indeed stupid, that I’d scoff at every time they’re described as intelligent if my belief in the character wasn’t super strained already. Basically, it’s not very good.