I recently finished reading Northern Spy, the thriller by Flynn Berry. It’s not my usual genre, but I really enjoyed the book.
Despite the title, the book is not really about apples. Tessa Daly is a divorced mother of a six month old child living in a village in the suburbs of Belfast who works for the BBC producing a news program. It’s been a few years since the Good Friday agreement was signed but tensions are as high as ever and there are still the occasional skirmishes. Tessa is surprised one day watching a news program at work to see her sister, Marion taking part in an IRA robbery.
Tessa assumes at first, and so tells the police, that Marion has been forced to participate by the IRA. Soon, however, she is shocked to discover that Marion has been working with the IRA for seven years. Recently, however, Marion says that she has begun secretly working with MI5 and feeding them information to help set the stage for a peace agreement.
In an attempt to reduce bloodshed, however, Marion has deliberately sabotaged a bomb that was targeted by the IRA at a market and now she is under surveillance by both the IRA and MI5. So she asks Tessa to join her acting as a double agent and funneling information to her MI5 contact. Tessa is accepted by the IRA and asked to do increasingly dangerous tasks as she feels more and more trapped and worried for her family and her son.
If you like your thrillers with lots of car chases and explosions and suave secret agents, this is not for you. It is a page-turner, though as the tension builds and both Tessa and Marion are in increasing danger of getting caught and killed both by the IRA and the police.
Berry is a good writer and the book is an enjoyable read. The story flows nicely as the tension and uncertainty build. I enjoyed it and you should give it a shot.
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