Three years ago, in the events that preceded Spy Hook, Bernard Samson’s wife Fiona defected from MI6 to the KGB. His position at MI6 barely survived. He’s picked up the pieces and moved out to the suburbs with his much younger girlfriend, who’s barely older than his children. Now he’s in­ves­ti­gat­ing a slush fund that’s gone missing and it seems that his questions are un­wel­come—­so unwelcome that by the end of the book, he’s on the run in Berlin from the British.

I preferred this book to Winter, which served as a distant prequel for three Bernard Samson trilogies by Deighton. The linear story of Spy Hook worked better than the series of vignettes in Winter.