Traitor's Kiss Paperback – 18 Dec. 2014

Brilliant as always. Heart-poundingly suspenseful. Love Mr Seymour!

Very good storyline and characters.Disturbing insight into the double dealing and treachery that goes on in the world of spies and spying.

Many threads with great creation of personalities, human strengths and weaknesses. A fantastic read. One of his very best. It made you read faster to discover the fates but saddened you to finish it.

An excellent book. Good plot very well written and held me griped until the last chapter

It must be my perennial lot to come upon books some time after they have been published. This is no exception but it is still currently on sale so perhaps there is value in giving an opinion now that the dust has settled.Credit where it's due, this book is well written in a technical sense. Throughout the whole of the book I found only one minor typographical error. There may have been others but if so I missed them. However Mr. Seymour would (either intentionally or unintentionally) misuse the word 'basha' preferring the more comic 'basher'. This may be the way soldiers pronounce it but it is not the way it is generally spelt. He also seemed somewhat confused as to what a basha is. It is a Malay word for shelter and in British military argot is usually a groundsheet or poncho hooked between two trees with bungees and easily camouflaged. In this book I feel Seymour has confused it with a LUP, or lying-up position. Easily done if you have no military background to call your own.The story itself is an update on the Cold War with the modern equivalent of the KGB, the FSB, coming in for a sound drubbing from Seymour's pen (as does the 'modern' Secret Intelligence Service). It seeems the Russians are still at their old Soviet tricks of mistreating and murdering anyone thought of as a traitor to the Motherland. The book is full of historical references; Seymour goes as far as putting anecdotes about Kaliningrad on the Polish/Russian border as a header to each chapter. It is this fiendish attention to detail which tends to derail the enjoyment of what otherwise would have been a page turner. Sadly never once whilst reading did I ache to continue, giving up at the end of each chapter with no hurry to pick up where I left off. Seymour is adept at putting the reader inside his protagonist's heads but sometimes it's not a good place to be as thought patterns tend to meander in loose connections and slow contemplations like a river decaying into oxbows as it reaches flat coastal plains.This won't put me off Seymour. I shall try some of his contemporary works before making a definitive judgement on his style of writing. From reading previous novels, which I've enjoyed, he has always had a tendency to over-complicate but in this book it has reached a peak of indulgence. Not one of his better works.

Delivered as forecast. Seymour's research means that this is an interesting and good read.

Yet another “can’t put downer” brilliant

Kept the pages turning; read well past my bedtime!

A brilliant book told through the eyes of so many different characters. You sympathise with every one of the characters. Flawed as they are. Fully recommended!

I decided to read this author because I was told that he is in the same league as John Le Carre. The book is about a spy but turns out to be more like a thriller and cannot be compared with JLC's books or his style etc. It could have been wrapped up in 350-370 pages rather than it's present length of over 500 pages. The author could have decided who are the core characters who need to be developed well. Instead, author dwells over at great length even on characters who could be construed as peripheral. Some times characters are introduced way ahead of their subsequent meaningful appearance and it is difficult to keep track. It is not a book which can be picked up after a couple of days for reading because one loses track. Action sequences are well written. I found myself becoming quite impatient towards the end, The last interrogation session goes on and on. I will read one more book of this author just to ensure that I am not doing injustice to him and missing out on a competent writer of spy genre.

The subject of this book interested me because it reminded me of some of John LeCarre's books, specifically "The Spy who Came in From the Cold". Especially interesting was the conflict between the old guard and the new, as shown by the bickering between Mowbray and Locke. This book is not the James Bond type of thriller, but rather a thinking persons book, where you can place yourself at the center of the intrigue and wonder how it will all work out. The author's choice of profanity in several places was the only negative for this book and I feel it would have lost nothing by not having them.

I had finished all of Eric Ambler and Alan Furst's output, so I decided to try one of Gerald Seymour's novels. After reading Traitor's Kiss, I can't say that Seymour is in the same category as those two masters of the espionage novel. My biggest complaint is that TK, like a lot of modern "thrillers," is simply too long and overstuffed with characters. Ambler and Furst's novels almost always focus on a single protagonist, while still managing to make the surrounding political and social environment come through, and contributing a few memorable secondary characters. Seymour seems to believe that more is better in creating characters, and devotes pages of exposition to around 10 different people in the first half of the book. Unfortunately, many of them, particularly the young MI6 agent Locke, still manage to come off as one-dimensional caricatures who exist only as foils for the "hero" characters. Seymour seems to only know one backstory, as everyone, Russian or British, is estranged from their family, still single as they approach middle age, and emotionally constipated. I'm not sure if the four veterans who are recalled to do the dirty work are characters from one of Seymour's earlier novels, but having to deal with their convoluted backstory and rather cliched current status as emotionally scarred veterans gets old before it begins. Eventually I found the Russian interrogator the most sympathetic person in the novel, which probably wasn't Seymour's intent.That said, the novel does pick up as it reached the halfway point, and the plotting is fairly ingenious. Seymour obviously knows his stuff factually. It would just be much improved if he dropped some of the pseudo-literary touches and pared down the length by about 100 pages.