Adam Colclough lives and works in the West Midlands, he writes regularly for a number of websites, one day he will get round to writing a book for someone else to review.
Beirut, Lebanon in the summer of 2006, the unending war between Israel and Hezbollah is tearing the city apart again. As the bombs rain down and refugees crowd the dockside Mossad and the CIA play a spying game that is as old and insoluble as the conflict.
Amid this chaos a CIA operative is tasked with orchestrating the assassination of a Hezbollah leader. A mission that will put her life at risk and reveal the tangled web of double and triple dealing between supposed allies. In the looking glass world of espionage, the demarcation line between friends and enemies is so thin as to be almost invisible.
The list of writers with a reasonable shot at filling the role as doyenne of the spy genre left vacant when John Le Carre died is a short one. There must though be a space in the top half reserved for Paul Vidich.
Beirut Station is a tale of manipulation and betrayal worthy of the master in his pomp. The setting is brilliantly realized perfectly catching the tension rippling through the air in a city that has been caught between the fault lines of history for generations. Vidich also writes with authority about the business of spying, from the tradecraft used by Analise as she negotiates the narrow streets of Beirut, to the machinations of the station chiefs.
This is an outstanding thriller that has its roots sunk deep in a conflict that has shaped modern history and, as this story shows, touched and too often damaged countless individual lives.
