The journalist as sleuth

Despite being well-travelled as the BBC’s world affairs editor, John Simpson doesn’t roam far from home in his spy thriller, Moscow, Midnight (John Murray, £20). Life and art intermingle, in both subject matter and character. The hero is named Jon Swift, a veteran journalist bristling under new media regimes. When government minister Patrick Macready is found dead — presumably from a solo sex game gone wrong — Swift takes it upon himself to clear up a few loose ends. Soon he’s under investigation himself, ostracised, and journeying to Moscow to work a connection to a number of Russians who have met similar ‘accidental’ fates.

Swift is cynical, unreconstructed in his view of women, a bit snobbish at times. But his voice is clear and strong, and his moral code keeps him on track. Simpson knows his stuff, obviously, and his plotting is strewn with expert analysis of international affairs and insider knowledge of journalistic practice: all very entertaining.