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Title: Spyship by Tom Keene, Brian Haynes ISBN: 0-8125-0585-9 Publisher: Tor Books Pub. Date: 01 October, 1985 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $3.95

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Average Customer Rating: 2.5 (2 reviews)

Rating: 1
Summary: Something's fishy here....
Comment: The spyship of the title is the mysterious "Mary Castor" a trawler built and launched with no minor fanfare from an working class British port town, and then mysteriously lost. The story has less to do with the ship than the investigative reporter who will do nothing uncover the secret of her loss. There are some clues - pictures of the ship's antennae and its not-quite-regulation electronics - and some interesting background info (the North Sea area in which Castor trawls is also rife with Soviet Submarine activity). While the mystery takes the book to solve, it's obvious from the start that something bad is going on, something so serious that the government (British at least) will do anything to cover up the secret.

So why is this book so bad? It may have to do with why this book is so unbelievable. The charachters aren't quite paper thin, but they're all losers - weak and timid on the inside where it counts. The writer goes to great pains to show how just about everyone here has some mixture within them of bitterness and timidity - whether it's an amatuer detective who's on the verge of uncovering the secret, or the chairman of a commission looking into the official cause of the Castor - each seems to think that the world has cheated them out of something, yet nobody has the slightest idea to get it back. This is a big mistake because the governmet goes to extreme ends to silence these people, even though few of them are intuitive enough to get through with their own lives, let alone uncover as big a mystery as the Mary Catsor. The next problem is the conspiracy - with British intel hiring a one-man murder crew to eliminate anybody who continues looking into the Mary Castor. Why such extreme measures are needed (even if the other charachters weren't losers) seems hard to accept. None of the other charachters seem suited to discover the Mary Castor, so why bother killing them? The hit-man aspect of the story seems strikingly less plausible than anything else in the book - only there for the action, and that only makes things worse. (The hero is a reporter, yet he manages to succeed where others fail in neutralizing the seasoned killer). And let's not forget the mystery. Ofcourse, the author had - and the story never progresses to the final discolsure. Instead, the charachters meander around until they discover somebody who can answer the questions for them. So much for investigative journalism. If you want to read about true tails of nautical intrigue, pick up a copy of "Blind Man's Bluff" or "Project Jenniffer".

Rating: 4
Summary: Entirely convincing Cold-War intrigue
Comment: Spyship could have been from Le Carré, Ludlum, or Forsythe: a well-written, well-documented, fast-paced novel. Its plot, about the investigation of a reporter into the mysterious sinking of a British fishing ship in the North Sea, takes the reader into a nightmarish world of political cover-ups of international consequences in the last decade of the Cold War. Pick up Spyship (if you can find this out-of-print jewel) and hold on to your life-jacket!