His exuberant, bullet-drenched prose, with its descriptions of intelligence tradecraft and modern anti-terrorism campaigns, bristles with authenticity.True to form, Cochrane is riven with demons.
But in what appears to have been a bad bit of espionage tradecraft by Russia's foreign intelligence service, the SVR, this Spanish citizen contacted another highly placed source in a different NATO country and made slightly clumsy attempts to recruit him.
Although some Jordanians whisper that the authorities may have fabricated the plot, the tradecraft of the alleged terrorists looks very much like al-Qaeda's: huge, multiple bombings of symbolic targets.This week's alleged terror attack in Damascus was more puzzling.
At 450 pages the book is too long, but just as spy-thriller writers leaven their narratives with tradecraft tips, Mr Deaver weaves in a steady flow of fascinating instructions on reading body language and eliciting information.
As every good thriller should try to do, "Shake Off" is peppered with expert tradecraft: how to hide money in a rolled-up newspaper, how wet paper is easier to flush away than dry.In this section Avanti Doing justice Mutiny and melancholy Hard to shake off Bitter road The dance in the night-time Correction: "The New North" ReprintsBut "Shake Off" is more than a straightforward spy thriller.
The tradecraft of silent watching and the discomfort, thirst and increasing claustrophobia of the hideout are brought very much to life, right down to coping with an attack of diarrhoea while holed up with no access to a toilet.
If this approach achieves short-term political hits, it does not tell sceptical voters they are led by high-minded people.And this damaging fixation with tradecraft is self-perpetuating because the Tory leaderself-perpetuating becauseivals, promothecolleagues wiTory simileadersroach.
One is to make the tradecraft convincing rather than simply gadget-ridden or exotic, and to make the organisations and people practising it feel believable.
One that increasingly looks like bucking the trend is Barry Eisler.The first two books that featured Mr Eisler's Japanese-American assassin-hero, John Rain, "Rain Fall" (2002) and "Hard Rain" (2003) were written with a delightfully soft touch and a powerful blend of excitement, exotica and what (ever since John le Carré) readers have known to call tradecraft.
Russia's GRU (the formidable military-intelligence service) must be enjoying the humiliation of their great rivals, the snooty SVR (foreign-intelligence service), whose sloppy tradecraft seems to have let a prized asset fall into the hands of the enemy.
Was it good surveillance, a cryptographic breakthrough, success in penetrating the Russian spy service or sloppy tradecraft by Vladimir Putin's spooks?
