Jon Morgan is a retired police Superintendent and francophile who, it is said, has consequently seen almost everything awful that people can do to each other. He relishes quality writing in all genres but advises particularly on police procedure for authors including John Harvey and Jon McGregor. Haunts bookshops both new and secondhand and stands with Erasmus: “When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I may buy food and clothes.”
Just for once the hyperbole is spot-on! This is a real page turner, starting slowly like one of the Slough House/Slow Horses novels of Mick Herron, but quite literally exploding into a real gore-fest with something of an ingénue heroine caught up in the middle. Like any heroine she is flawed being unable partly because of her job, to maintain any relationships for long.
Sally Page, who runs everywhere – hence the title – is what in apparent MI5 parlance is known as a 'footie' or Secret Service dogsbody whose daily job, is to mundanely, maintain cover stories or 'legends' such as fake identities and their depth, on social media, ensuring credit and debit as well as loyalty cards are actually used and have a footprint and backstory to make them appear credible
She also, on a daily basis, maintains and prepares flats and safe-houses used and ‘lived’ in by agents thereby providing depth to potential checks that the operatives and their lives and lifestyles are absolutely real and as random and chaotic as any normal life.
Arriving at work one day she does the coffee run for her similarly employed colleagues, partly to get coffee but also to use the cards she is charged with maintaining and on her return finds a massacre of her co-workers, all of whom have been professionally and brutally killed.
Missing are the records of the people and paces she is responsible for updating. Her less than helpful boss at MI5, a man who has been resublime for retarding her career, is as much use as a chocolate teapot. The process of working out how she is being targeted and tracked as well as her exploits in escaping death are fast paced and teeter from one cliff edge to another.
What follows is not your standard spy thriller but a much more carefully and credibly constructed set of events that reveals her latent skills and abilities as well as the potential for a traitor at the hear of the Secret Intelligence Service.
The ramifications of what she is embroiled in go far beyond our own borders, and reveal a world where international criminal gangs have a reach into every level of society and more power and influence than many governments.
Yes, there are elements that require the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ and the traitor is a little too obvious, but on the whole Leather, who I have not read before, entertains and whisks the reader along at a breath-taking pace. This book would make a brilliant film and is best read at one sitting.
