The Byzantine murkiness of Northern Ireland’s political history is often difficult to grasp. Still, it provides fertile ground for a compelling story. In Deep Swimmers, the latest instalment in his Mick Herron–esque series, Richard Robinson returns to 1990s Belfast, where craic and brutality are served up in equal measure.
His winsome protagonists—the junior spooks, Jones and Richmond—continue their mission in the province, having barely recovered from the events of the previous novel. They are soon drawn into the peculiar case of an elderly couple who appear to have leapt to their deaths from a tower block. Intelligence quickly reveals that the ill-fated pair were “deep swimmers”—espionage parlance for long-entrenched spies who have gone native. With help from their defiantly unglamorous crew, Jones and Richmond are plunged into another perilous adventure, which leads them to the astonishing revelation of a dark historical truth.
A skilled storyteller, Robinson weaves erudition, jet-black humour, and intrigue into a plot that moves with the breakneck pace of an action movie.