Walk ins welcome. Defectors encouraged.
It’s not a shingle openly displayed on diplomatic outposts, but the traitor’s gates are always open. Then it’s a process of determining the enfumage, which in espionage parlance means a fake person or document fed to a foreign service to make to make them believe a lie. Enfumage is bandied, brandished, banished and brazen throughout Jack Beaumont’s latest Frenchman thriller, LIAR’S GAME.
A man identifying himself as Kim Yu-Jin walks into the French Embassy in Beijing and declares that he is a North Korean security official requesting asylum. He claims to possess critical intelligence on a catastrophic cyber attack capable of crippling the global economy.
Alec de Payns, code named Aguilar, and his team are dispatched to ex filtrate the Korean. A precision mission precisely following all the protocols, the operation unexpectedly fails igniting a fuse that burns slow but true through this explosive narrative.
Aguilar returns to Paris and continues with another, seemingly unconnected mission, Operation Plantation, where he has infiltrated a key asset, code named Limelight. Shades of From Russia With Love shadow the narrative where emotion and romance enter the liar’s lair.
Plugged into contemporary Geo-political goings on, LIAR’S GAME snakes through Russia, China, France, Vietnam and Thailand like a main circuit cable pulsing with high voltage intrigue. High voltage high stakes as the manipulation of India’s currency is the zero sum game.
By any means necessary is the game plan and money, ideology, coercion and ego, the four main means of leverage to manipulate someone into betraying their country are put to tacit and tactical use.
As in the first two books of the series, readers can revel in the detailed description of trade craft, from the old school bouletage, reminiscent of James Bond’s placing strands of hair over wardrobe doors where Alec de Payns puts pins in doors, and arranges three point alignments of objects within the apartment a silent sentinels against incursion to more modern, digital age applications.
Along with the action man par excellence, Alec de Payns, LIAR’S GAME sees the return of his operational team mates, the fantastic four, Shrek, Jeje and Templar, and the brilliant boss of Y Division, the remarkable and looming creation, Dominic Briffaut.
LIAR’S GAME is a competition between external threats and internal machinations, ambitious people wanting to move up and they don’t want to wait. Combating bad actors within and without creates a narrative that crackles like thin ice with dread and suspense.
The political and emotional themes are inseparable in this gripping piece of storytelling, convincing in technical detail, with characters and settings fully realised, and a pace that gallops off the page.
THE LIAR’S GAME by Jack Beaumont is published by Allen & Unwin.
