An Officer and a Spy

LoveReading Says

Winner of the Specsavers CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger - Thriller of the Year 2014.

Open this book and you know immediately that you are in good hands. Harris’ fluent style, careful plotting and cranked up tension leave you breathlessly turning the pages. It is a strange story of a government concealing the truth and the lengths it will go to do so. Fabrication, deceit, cover-up and the dark underworld of spying are masterfully portrayed.

We see the whole sorry tale through the eyes of Georges Picquart, originally Dreyfus’ colleague and tutor. His pursuit of the truth through his own court martial and later trial is surprisingly tense given that this is based on fact and we know the ending. So the tension is not in the outcome but in the execution.

The court scenes are particularly impressive. It is one of the most extraordinary cases that changed the course of French history. It is difficult to comprehend that something so small had such a huge effect on a nation.

Reviewed by Sarah Broadhurst
Sarah Broadhurst spent her early working life in the book trade in both retail and wholesale until the arrival of children forced her to look for freelance work she could do from…
More reviews by Sarah Broadhurst

About An Officer and a Spy

January 1895. On a freezing morning in the heart of Paris, an army officer, Georges Picquart, witnesses a convicted spy, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, being publicly humiliated in front of twenty thousand spectators baying 'Death to the Jew!' The officer is rewarded with promotion: Picquart is made the French army's youngest colonel and put in command of 'the Statistical Section' - the shadowy intelligence unit that tracked down Dreyfus.

Read the full description

Find This Book In