Egleton, Clive

Dead Reckoning

London, Coronet. 342 pp. £5.99.

A massacre in a London doctor's office. One of the victims is Harriet Ashton. Harriet Ashton is not unconnected with the British secret service. The secret service is appalled. Something must be done - like find, who killed her and why. Never mind the doctor!

The British crime writer Laurence Henderson in his The Final Glass (Academy Chicago) put forward the thesis that as between the British secret service and the IRA, the former did not have a chance. Essentially, said Henderson, for the secret service this is a job. The staff are not idealists. The IRA were "idealists". As between "employees" and "idealists", the former did not have a chance.

There are lots of tantalizing strands in this book (murder, deception, high technology, computer hackers, the Russians, the IRA, the FBI), and a fascinating array of characters. But the main play is the rivalry for promotion. The heads of the secret service play footsie with politicians who determine who gets the top job. One of the contenders is Jill Sheridan, ambitious, malevolent, ruthless. Are such as she best at their job? (Read and find out).

Aficionados have been worrying unnecessarily that the demise of the Soviet Union has meant the demise of the spy novel. The spy novel is doing better than a lot of secret services.

This is the seventh novel featuring Peter Ashton, who is not likely to head the secret service, but clean up its mess. Clive Egleton soldiered all over and was in intelligence.

Le Carré, John

Single and Single

London, Coronet (Hodder & Stoughton). 413 pp. £6.99.

"Nobody -- no member of my House or family -- is in the remotest way guilty of such an act. However, as you can see for yourself, my denials have so far fallen on deaf ears."

The heir apparent to the house of Single & Single is being trained to take over from his father. He is as able as his father, but must first be taught to be proud of him. Gradually comes the discovery that his father is a crook, a major player in the world of international crime, and in danger from his associates because he has not been as successful as he had made himself out to be.

Various puzzling strands make up this book. At heart lies a semi-pro magician. A corporate lawyer is murdered. Moneys appear in bank accounts. The sheer scale of international crime grows and grows, and so does Russia's contribution to it. Some perpetrators are more efficient than others. The less efficient turn on each other in anger and frustration. The men who head such organisms on either side think and feel differently. They won't be judged by the standards of lesser men.

The one thing they have is a sense of dynasty. Dynasties clash.

The heir apparent to the house of Single & Single has to save his own life, that of his daughter, but also has to decide, what about his father?

A moral (or immoral) tale.

They want their sons to take over.

Macneill, Alastair

Damage Control

London, Gollancz. 285 pp. £16.99.

A previous director of the CIA, with the connivance of several national intelligence agencies, sets up a team of international criminals to execute those international criminals who were beyond the reach of the law of any individual country. The new organization was to be named CABAL. No government was to be told. Each intelligence agency paid a certain amount into a slush fund. The participants thought there were enough safeguards. There were, as regards secrecy, but not as regards control. The director died and CABAL became a loose cannon, selling its services to the highest bidder. Nobody seemed to know how to get to it to control it, and none of the agencies were prepared to admit what had happened.

One day a policeman arrives at Beth Grant's office. Her husband Ian was shot dead outside a jazz club. Her suspicions are roused. Her husband did not like jazz. Her husband is supposed to be having an affair with another woman, now accused of the murder. But she won't believe it.

Wheels turn within wheels as Beth Grant decides to track down her husband's assassin, and to prove top herself that he was never unfaithful to her. Now she discovers she cannot tell friends from enemies. She gets close and closer to the truth, and the mysterious Sammy Kahn who heads the death squad. The accused woman is innocent, but who did it, and why? The CABAL decides she must be eliminated.

Right to the end we are kept guessing about the identity of the assassins, who is guilty, who is innocent, and the identity of Sammy Kahn comes as a jolt in the last line.

Alastair MacNeill was born in Scotland, lived in South Africa and wrote seven novels based on storylines by Alistair MacLean. He now lives in the UK.

Rathbone, Julian

Brandenburg Concerto

London, Serpent's Tail. 245 pp. £7.99.

The Soviets have pulled out of East Germany, but when they got back four trainloads of ammunition have gone missing. And when they are found, they are near a sealed wagon how full of the remains of what are presumed Jews intended for gas chambers.

This is a first-class post-Gorbachev thriller. Anyone fighting a "small" war will pay millions for the four trainloads of ammunition. An assortment of dicey characters go after them, willing to stop at nothing.

Even more interesting is the German police team. The head is Renata Fechter (single mother) and she is assisted by a Turk and by the daughter of American blacks. Whatever happened to the notion of that one pure German people!

There is a line in Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal, when a young German tells a Nazi that what he objected to most is that what the Nazis did gave him a bad name. There are echoes of this in the last two lines of this book, lines of pure genius. No one, and especially no one Jewish, will ever forget them.

Julian Rathbone is English and lives in England, though he did a stint in Turkey teaching English.