Crisis: the action-packed Sunday Times No. 1 bestseller

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In co-operation with a rogue state, and using the attributes of his mini-submarines usually used for smuggling the drugs, he has concocted a plan that will wipe the smile off the faces of those gringos – literally!

I was hoping someone of Frank Gardner's impressive journalistic background would be able to come up with something a bit less derivative than this by-the-numbers spook yarn with its cliche square-jawed ex-Commando hero and assorted snarling, one-dimensional Latino baddies. This is a feat that would challenge the skipper of a Trident submarine, yet these two bozos manage it with ease - without any navigation equipment more sophisticated than a compass. While I did not find this a slow start to the story, neither was it a ramped-up, heavily action orientated type of beginning that a lot of thrillers are expected to have nowadays. Very much in the vein of McNab and Ryan and while Mr Gardner may not be as expert on weapons and tactics he does the bigger picture stuff very well.

Awarded an OBE in 2005 for services to journalism, Frank Gardner was profiled in the BBC's television series, Who Do You Think You Are?

With excellent characters, a modern and realistic outlook to our current world and solid plotting and pacing, I thought this was an exceptional spy/thriller style of story and I am eager to read the author’s next offering. I didn’t find many of the characters to be overdrawn or caricature-like, which in itself was refreshing. The idea of a Colombian drug lord, incensed by successful, British lead attempts to curtail his business, scheming with the North Koreans to set off a nuclear dirty-bomb in the UK sounds like the stuff of a lesser Bond movie, and if the rest of Crisis was similarly fantastical it might have worked as a plot hook. We don’t need to spend time with the man organising the Rememberance Sunday ceremony at the Cenotaph, or need to know so much about the welder working for the bad guys to help them build their bomb (another entirely unrealistic character).

Past half way is where the suspense begins, a slow and steady start but it does get there and the true gripping chapters come out to play. When SIS operative Jeremy Benton is murdered in Tumaco, Colombia, ex-SBS and ‘probationary’ agent Luke Carlton, who spent his childhood growing up in Colombia, is despatched to investigate. The US, and particularly the UK, have been interfering with his narcotics business for far too long, and it has cost him too much money to carry on doing nothing about it. Picked this off the library shelf because Frank Gardner is an engaging, dynamic, original and succinct BBC correspondent. Drawing on his years of experience reporting on security matters, CRISIS is Frank Gardner's debut novel.