JUDE LYON

Jude Lyon is an agent with MI6.

He answers to Samantha Burns, "otherwise known as Control, but more commonly Queen Bee", not to mention simply as 'C'. Lyon was brought into MI6 personally by Queen Bee who "recruited him from the army and has carefully cultivated his career". Nevertheless it should be said that he seems to have a tempestuous relationship with her.

To be fair to Lyon, I would hazard that could be said of anyone who has had a connection with this perpetually irritated woman. An interesting feature to Queen Bee is that she has as her factotum a toady individual with the appropriate name of Totty who likes to give the impression that he has "special insight into [her] moods though Jude guesses that the opposite is true. That's why she keeps him close. He is a useful idiot".

About Lyon it is said early on that his "immigrant provenance is .. exotic and fragmentary, shot through with competing veins of conformity and criminality, from a cigar-chomping bank robber for a grandfather to a general given to eccentricity and dark moods for a father." More to the point, "for all that he is clubbable and well groomed, his curriculum vitae a whistle-stop tour of the establishment, there is something solitary and non-conformist about Jude. His desire for service is tempered by an increasing distrust of those in authority. And he carries within himself a reckless desire for truth that operates regardless of a quieter voice that struggles to plead caution."

An important note on the career of Lyon is that our initial introduction to him is as he is continuing an ongoing seduction of a beautiful woman a decade older than he, Yulia Ermolaeva, wife of a prominent GRU official and herself an officer with the Russian SVR. This intimacy is as directed by Queen Bee but Lyon is finding it especially distasteful to be the honey in the trap, however alluring and pleasurable Yulia might be. But at the same time there exists the question (to us, not yet to Lyon) as to who is being the lure.

Good Lines:
- When talking about a very bad man Lyon is sent to capture, someone referred to the man as a monster to which Lyon states, "We live in a time of monsters".
- Regarding trouble dealing with the Russian President, one SVR officer states, "Our mistake is to keep talking about the world as it is, not as the president would like it to be".

A word that I have used very sparingly over the years towards anyone's writing but one that definitely applies to the words put on paper by author Simon Conway is "delicious". 

I became a huge fan of his when I devoured and savored another series from a a decade before, Jonah Said. I was sorry that he chose to not continue with that character and to then pen several non-series thriller (all deserving reading, by the way). Then, luckily for me and my passion with series, he came again into my purview with this new series of, as of this writing, three books.

Conway gives us such a wonderful ride in his stories with twists that, for me anyways, are not seen coming but once there make terrific sense. There is a ton of action in these tales but there is also a lot of thought by the characters before the action takes place - said thought not slowing things down at all but letting us know there is a reason for why the characters do what they do.

When the author writes of a place, you are there. When he presents a character, you can see him in front of you. And when the action throws dust and debris and often blood all over the place, you feel you might could use a shower.