The Runner - Stephen Leather

Written by Stephen Leather
Read by Laura Kirman
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

· Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
· Release date: 01-23-20
· Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Sally Page is an MI5 ‘footie’, a junior Secret Service Agent who maintains ‘legends’: fake identities or footprints used by real spies.

Her day consists of maintaining flats and houses where the legends allegedly live, doing online shopping, using payment, loyalty and travel cards and going on social media in their names - anything to give the impression to hostile surveillance that the legends are living, breathing individuals.

One day she goes out for a coffee run from the safe house from which she and her fellow footies operate. When she comes back they have all been murdered, and she barely escapes with her own life. She is on the run: but from whom she has no idea. Worse, her bosses at MI5 seem powerless to help her. To live, she will have to use all the lies and false identities she has so carefully created while discovering the truth….

“….. She’s no trained Tier One operator but she is a smart, determined and gutsy young lady. She does the logical things to get to safety (no frustrated reader shouting at the book “but why don’t you just ring for help” type stuff) and ends up realising that she may not be able to trust those on her own side.

This is set in the “Spiderverse” so we get to see SAS Major Gannon as a significant character doing his day job and there are a couple of other guest appearances that feel utterly right, and not forced in.

I thought this was fantastic, a couple of very minor flaws are overcome by a really fast paced and clever story. Everything you could want from an action thriller and immensely satisfying.

Those other British thriller writers are going to be jealous.” “A Goodreads review…