Traitors

Move over boys, Sophie Racine has got this!

Fans of the thriller genre may already be familiar with Aiden Snow, the former SAS trooper turned Ukraine-based school teacher, now plying his trade for British Intelligence. His creator, Alex Shaw, has carved out a niche for himself using his own, intimate knowledge of the Ukraine and that region, to craft his critically popular series. In Traitors, Shaw uses that established universe to introduce a new series.

The temptation might have been to essentially do the same thing again. Why not? It's working very well so far, so why tamper with a proven formula? He could easily have invented another Aiden Snow, and his fans would doubtless have been very happy. Instead, Shaw has taken a gamble. This new series centres around Sophie Racine. Again, he could just have written a female Aiden Snow, but instead, Racine is an assassin working undercover for the French intelligence agency DGSE. She is the daughter of a former French Foreign Legion officer, is formidable and utterly ruthless.

Sent by the French government to travel to war-torn Ukraine, her mission is to assassinate a Russian spy whose betrayal of the French secret service caused the deaths of countless French operatives. At the same time, Aiden Snow has been tasked by British Intelligence to rescue a UK citizen caught up in the conflict. Snow and Racine's missions collide in the rebel-held Donetsk region of Ukraine and they must join forces - something that loner Racine in particular finds challenging.

Fans of Aiden Snow can be reassured that this isn't just a glorified cameo - he plays a substantial and critical role in the plot - but make no mistake, this is Sophie Racine's story. It's a shrewd move, allowing the author to quite legitimately market the book to his existing Aiden Snow fans and hopefully hook them into a new series. Racine is also introduced fully-formed; this is not an origins story, she's been plying her trade for some years already. But Shaw has given her an interesting backstory, which is introduced in chunks throughout the book. It's clear that there is still much to be told about her early life, which bodes well for a series. 

When writing about a female working in a traditionally male-dominated sphere, the temptation for many authors (especially males) is to go down the femme fatale route. Shaw has resisted this; Racine is unquestionably a female character, but there are no lingering descriptions of her physically and she doesn't perform implausibly athletic spinning kicks in high heels whilst wearing a cocktail dress. 

As readers familiar with Shaw's previous work have come to expect, the action is relentless and thrilling, with a fine balance between enough military detail to satisfy fans of big boy's toys, but not enough to bore. Similarly, Shaw has put his deep understanding of the complex political issues in Ukraine - in particular the occupied Donetsk region - to good use. He portrays the lives and experiences of the people surviving in an often-forgotten war with sympathy and insight, without tipping over into a polemic.