Yesterday’s Spy opens in a bierkeller in Gottingen, Germany in 1933. Young Cambridge student Amanda James gets on the wrong side of a drunken and bellicose Nazi gang toasting the glories of new Reich. If not for the intervention of fellow Brit Harry Tower things could get very nasty for Amanda. Curiously, the whole time the conflict is happening Harry has the feeling a man is watching him, assessing his actions. In the coming years, Harry marries Amanda, they have a son, Sean, and Harry begins working for SIS. Author Tom Bradby’s latest offering ‘Yesterday’s Spy’ is set mainly in 1950’s Tehran and features recently retired SIS agent Harry Towers. Tom Bradby writes good and believable characters but his locations and settings are what marks out his stories. Sean vanished after his car was involved in an incident at a small village, there are signs of a struggle and a crash. With the help of Shahnaz, Sean’s girlfriend, the daughter of a general friendly to the Shah’s cause, Harry sets about navigating the local quagmire for the truth. Did Sean upset the city’s police chief, were his articles critical of the regime his downfall and where do the Russians figure in all this? Harry has his own secrets and all he has to go on is a cryptic note left on Sean’s desk.

thrillers featuring MI6 operative Kate Henderson. As the title suggests in this standalone thriller he has looked to the past history of the British Intelligence Service. This I enjoyed but was very different to the trilogy, the historical information is amazing and anyone with an interest in Iranian local and world politics in the 1950’s will find it a must This is a love story because it’s about Harry and Amanda and Sean and Shahnaz. Amanda committed suicide and Bradby blends her story into the relationship between father and son very skilfully. Can Harry not only find Sean but reconcile with him about the family’s past? Both this and the spy story work. It is 1953. Harry Tower has been a talented British SIS officer for many years. So talented that he’s trusted by Winston Churchill.Twenty years later. Harry is now a fading star in the SIS firmament. He is called to Downing Street because of his expertise in Iran. Harry has served in Tehran and his son, Sean, is still there. Churchill is about to approve British involvement in Operation Ajax, a plan in conjunction with the Americans to oust Iran’s legitimate and popular nationalist prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh. As is typical of spy novels that incorporate a mole, the reader is asked to guess the mole’s identity. I guessed wrong, so Bradby scored a point for his surprising reveal. The ending is not only surprising, it is redemptive and satisfying.

A big thank you to Random House UK, Transworld Publishers, Bantam Press and Netgalley for the opportunity to read and review this book. I loved the last three books he had written in the Kate Henderson series so was very excited to be invited to read Tom Bradby's latest book. This is my first experience of the authors books and I must say I was very impressed.. His telling of fiction is as good as his telling of the news on TV! Yesterday's Spy is a work of fiction set in a few days of real history, the Iranian coup of 1953 when the democratically elected Prime Minister was overthrown in a revolt orchestrated by the US and UK governments. The motivation was to both, prop up the Shah who was sympathetic with the West and generous with terms to exploit Iran's oil reserves, and to keep out influence from the USSR. Thrown into this real life subterfuge are the fictional characters of this story namely Harry Tower, a long serving MI5 operative but a bit of a misfit, his estranged son Sean, a reporter who has gone missing in Iran and Sean's girlfriend Shahnaz whose also has an estranged father, an important figure in the Iranian Military. Harry secretly travels to Tehran to try and find his son and comes across Shahnaz, unaware his son was in any relationship. This unlikely pairing with suspicions on both sides set of in search of Sean as the expected coup with the inevitable chaos and confusion starts to unfold. Embattled agent Bernard Samson is used to being passed over for promotion as his younger, more ambitious colleagues – including his own wife Fiona – rise up the ranks of MI6. When a valued agent in East Berlin warns the British of a mole at the heart of the Service, Samson must return to the field and the city he loves to uncover the traitor’s identityDeception has a nasty habit of eating away at people. Lying about your job to your family and neighbors. Lying to your co- workers about the work that you are doing. Lying about the work to your government who is lying about the work they don't want to know what you are doing. Lying to yourself about the importance of what you do, though all everything that exists around you is built up on a very precarious pedestal, and can fall all away with just one truth. Tom Bradby in the historical thriller Yesterday's Son shows the price of deception on one man and his attempt to fix a legacy of wrongs for his only son's safety. I read this shortly after reading the highly acclaimed John Le Carre novel "Tinker, Tailor Soldier, Spy" and it took me a while for me to separate this book from that one, particularly the main character Harry Tower who would fit right in the Le Carre novel. I liked this much better than Tinker, Tailor, Solider Spy.

I'd only recently found out about Goodreads giveaways and spammed a bunch and this was the one I won. I was super excited to read it as I'd recently read my first Tom Bradby novel "White Russian" and absolutely loved it.I certainly felt that Tom Bradby had undertaken considerable research into the politics of the period including the 1953 Iranian coup. The emerging story of the forces behind the coup, including both British and Americans as well as senior figures in the Iranian police and army. World-weary agent Bernard Samson is losing control of his personal and professional life. Sent to Mexico to aid the defection of a KGB agent to the West, he has a chance to prove his worth. Instead he is torn between conflicting loyalties, and lost in a maze of double-dealing and duplicity. Note: My thanks to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for providing me with a free electronic copy of this book for review purposes.

Their relationship has never recovered since Harry's wife's suicide, for which Sean holds his father responsible. And Harry, with his career on the verge of disintegration, needs to find him and put things right.

Now, Harry has secretly flown to Tehran to find his son, a novice journalist for the Manchester Guardian, who has been kidnapped. There, he pursues first one lead to his son, then another, encountering lies at every turn. Meanwhile, he finds that MI6 is attempting to frame him as a scapegoat for missions that went wrong during and after World War II. Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuth