Liar’s Game by Jack Beaumont

Ex-spy Jack Beaumont’s thrillers featuring French DGSE operative Alec de Payns started with The Frenchman and continued with Dark Arena. Those books were characterised by a strong sense of verisimilitude – that this was espionage fiction written by someone who knew what they were talking about. That sense continues with the third, and probably the best (and maybe the last) volume in this series – Liar’s Game.

French spy Alec de Payns has a lot on his plate when Liar’s Game opens. He is in a Russian coastal town trying to romance the personal assistant of a Russian oligarch who has ties to the Chinese. But de Payns is called away from that mission and asked to take his team to China to extract a North Korean defector who has walked into the French embassy seeking asylum. At the same time, de Payns is also trying to become an expert in quantum computing to try and head off the recruitment of a French scientist also by the Chinese secret service. Everything starts to unravel when the North Korean defector is killed and de Payns and his team begin to suspect that they are being targeted due to internal machinations of the French secret service.

Because of everything going on in Liar’s Game it takes a fair while to set up all of the moving parts. But for those interested in this shadow world, the way in which all of this is described by Beaumont is fascinating. And once all of those plot threads are in play, the action and the tension ramps up to some page-turning covert and overt missions.

Liar’s Game is one of a number of novels coming out from people who have first hand experience in the espionage game. These includes books by former MI5 head Stella Rimington and those by former CIA analyst David McCloskey. As with both of these other writers, Beaumont has become better as he has gone along. Finding greater comfort in combining his technical knowledge with plot and character work. Liar’s Game may or may not be the final Alec de Payns novel, either way it will be interesting to see what Beaumont delivers next.

Liar's Game by Jack Beuamont

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8.0/10