The Last Defector: Tony Cape

I read Tony Cape's first book featuring Derek Smailes, The Cambridge Theorum,  almost exactly eight years ago, right before I started blogging. I liked it a lot and I was grateful that Felony and Mayhem had published a new edition of that book.

In the first book, Derek Smailes is a detective sergeant in Cambridge. He investigates the suicide of a student at the university who was researching the possibility of a fifth Cambridge spy. That book begins as a police procedural and morphs into spy fiction. Set in the 1980s, it was first published in 1989.

In the follow-up to that first novel, Derek has been offered a position in MI-5, and has decided to accept it because he will be sent to New York for his first assignment. He has always had an interest in the US and its culture and he is delighted to be able to experience it directly. He has a junior position as a security officer at the British Mission to the UN. The story is set when the Cold War is coming to an end and disarmament talks are going on (late 1980s).

Based on a recording recovered from a listening device, Derek's superiors plan to try to convince a Soviet citizen also working at the UN to defect and provide information on disarmament plans in Russia. They decide to use Derek as the contact point for the mission, and allow him to plan the approach. The setup of the scheme to soften up the Russian for defection is complex and intriguing. A secondary plot in The Last Defector takes place in the Soviet Union, and follows a conspiracy to take over the government due to dissatisfaction with the current leader.

Initially the planned defection goes well, but as things start to fall apart, Derek ends up suspecting just about everyone he is working with of treachery, even the woman he wants to marry. He is a more realistic protagonist than some I have encountered in spy fiction. He is eager to take on a challenging assignment that could give his career a quick shot in the arm, but has doubts about his abilities and whether he and his group are doing the right thing.

I found this second book in the Derek Smailes series to be a worthy successor to the first. The plot was complex but not confusing. There were a lot of characters to keep track of, but that wasn't a problem either. The people he works with are well developed characters, with different personalities, but the officials back in Russia are more stereotypical. However, that seems to be true in many spy books I have read.

As with the first book, it was the development of the main character, Derek, and his new relationships in his job and with his ex-wife and daughter back in England, that made this book especially enjoyable to read. I like it when espionage stories explore the characters personal lives and motives, and I was happy that I made the effort to find a copy of the second book in this series.

This biographical information is available at Felony and Mayhem:

Tony Cape was born in Wales and grew up in Yorkshire before attending Cambridge University. After working as a journalist in Northern Ireland and England he moved to the United States in 1977 to join the Buddhist community of Tibetan meditation master Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche. In the 1990s, he published a series of spy novels featuring Derek Smailes, a former police detective turned counterintelligence officer. The first of these, The Cambridge Theorem, became a bestseller in Britain and Italy, and was re-released by Felony and Mayhem Press in 2006.

See my review of The Cambridge Theorem.


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Publisher:  Doubleday, 1991.
Length:      390 pages
Format:      Hardcover
Series:       Derek Smailes, #2
Setting:      New York City, US; UK
Genre:       Spy fiction
Source:      I purchased my copy in 2013.