The Maze of Cadiz (John Murray, £16.99) by Aly Monroe is also a first novel, and the first in a projected espionage series against the backdrop of Britain’s withdrawal from Empire. In 1944, British intelligence send Peter Cotton, a Cambridge-educated former soldier, to Cadiz, with orders to close their office there and arrest the resident agent, who appears to have gone off the rails. But when he reaches Cadiz, the agent is dead. Cotton investigates the death, and in doing so is drawn unwillingly into an uneasy alliance with the local police inspector.

There’s more than a touch of Eric Ambler in this novel. Monroe is very good indeed on the Spanish background of the book — Franco’s Spain in the closing phase of the war, when the Generalissimo was edging away from the Axis powers. The decaying port of Cadiz festers in the summer heat, and so do the passions of the city’s little expatriate community. As in all the best espionage stories, the personal and the political are inextricably entangled.

Andrew Taylor’s latest novel is Bleeding Heart Square (Penguin).

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