The Sirius Crossing John Creed Faber & Faber £10.99, pbk Reviewed by Simon Fowler

First a warning - don't read this book if you suffer from sea-sickness.

Jack Valentine is a spy, who wants to retire, but is persuaded to undertake one more mission to find out what American Special Forces were doing in Northern Ireland 25 years ago. Which, makes you ask whether there are any young spies waiting and willing to serve their country any more. During the course of the novel he meets romantic and heroic IRA members (one of whom is his truelove) and a cynical Irish detective and spends a lot of time being chased by American and British officials. At the heart of the novel - indeed it takes up well over a third of it - is a chase across the North Sea in a leaky trawler, in which every toss of a wave (naturally it takes place in the worst storm for many years) is graphically portrayed and the hero and his friends display super-human endurance. It is easy to mock the preposterous nature of the thriller genre, but this is a tautly written example with some interesting things to say about the war which fought in Ulster.