Great story, thrilling plot that I could not put down. Well worth a read, and would recommend to others.

In have read many books by Stella Rimington and I have loved all of them but this one is not as good as her others. It was not as gripping her other books.

I've read several of the Liz Carlyle series previously and really enjoyed them. Liz Carlyle is a brilliant character and I'm always intrigued at what she's going to face next. This case is particularly topical and I found it horrifying and fascinating in equal measure. The plot may not be filled with bodies piling up left, right and centre at a breakneck pace, but I think it is more unsettling because of the lack of shortlived shock and awe. It lived with me when I had to put it down and caused me to ignore my alarm on several occasions. An excellent addition to the series.

The Moscow Sleepers is the first spy novel I have read as it is not a genre I am usually interested in. The reason I chose to request this book for review is that I liked the sound of the book based on the blurb.
Stella Rimington has experience in the field and this is clearly reflected in the novel. There are no off-putting incredible feats instead The Moscow Sleepers provides the reader with what I would imagine is a more accurate reflection of life in this business. Whilst I liked this it doesn’t exactly make for a thrilling read and fans of James Bond should look elsewhere.
Having said that The Moscow Sleepers was fast-paced in its own way and I didn’t find myself wanting to find something more interesting to read.
The book begins with a nurse looking after dying patients somewhere in Vermont.
“People came her to die. And die is what they all did. Nobody left here cured.”
Every patient in there received regular visitors apart from one man – Lars Petersen. He alone had no visitors during the stay, of this she was sure as each visitor had to be logged and the nurses were under strict instructions to report it if this man were to have visitors. Though it had never been confirmed the nurse believes it is because this man is suspected of being a spy. So, it is with surprise that she realises Lars has a visitor that night ‘an old school friend.’
London and the Americans become involved in trying to discover what the ‘Illegal’ was doing during his stay and stumble upon a plot that takes them to both Berlin and a boarding school in the Suffolk countryside.
There were a lot of characters in The Moscow Sleepers and I confess to finding myself at a loss whilst trying to remember who some of the peripheral characters were. On the whole though I found the characters engaging and found that I wanted to continue reading about them.
Initially I didn’t realise The Moscow Sleepers was part of a larger series, but I feel that this book worked quite well as a stand alone and my lack of knowledge of the other books didn’t necessarily detract from my enjoyment of the book.
One thing that did detract from the book for me was the ending felt a little bit like the author was in a rush to tie it all up in a neat little bow. I felt that there were parts of the story that could have benefitted from more details and the romantic entanglements were a bit superfluous.
On the whole though I enjoyed reading The Moscow Sleepers and would read another by her.

A professor dying in America, a school for refugees in Germany and a boarding school in Suffolk - but what connects them? Liz Carlyle and others in the intelligence service believe the Russians are up to something. Decent enough read just didn’t keep me as gripped as I thought it would.

Thanks to Netgalley, Bloomsbury and Stella Rimington for the ARC of this book in return for an honest review.

Having read that Stella Rimington was a former Director General of MI5 I was looking forward to a fast paced and authentic spy novel. I’m not sure how much my appreciation was marred by not having read the previous ‘Liz Carlyle’ books - it must be difficult to know how much information to repeat so that the followers of the series are not bored- but I did not engage with the characters. The plot was interesting enough to keep me reading though and I will probably seek out the first book of the series

3.5 Stars

As a huge fan of spy thrillers (particularly the likes of Le Carré) and having enjoyed Dame Stella Rimington's first book in the Liz Carlyle series - At Risk, I had very high hopes for this latest book, particularly in our current climate, where sleeper agents have been uncovered and Russian agents have been found operating on foreign soil.

From these books the reader can expect authenticity - the author being the former Director General of MI5. The books in the series are also suitably complex. Here, the plot is complicated and occasionally overly so, with a number of characters who in my mind didn't further the plot.

At Risk was a highly addictive page-turner and Dame Rimington managed to keep me absolutely hooked throughout - I immediately recommended it to my friends. Here however, I felt my concentration drifting in places.

I really hope the next Liz Carlyle is as fantastic as those earlier books in the series.

Many thanks to NetGalley, Bloomsbury and the author for a copy of this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Thanks NetGalley for the opportunity to read this novel pre-publication. It was not as pacy or descriptive as I expected from a writer with insider knowledge nevertheless, a pleasant read but not startling. I have not read any other Stella Rimington books - would I pick up another one, well the jury is out for the moment !

'The Moscow Sleepers' is the tenth book in the Liz Carlyle espionage series by former MI5 agent Stella Rimington. Being a big fan of spy novels, when I read the synopsis I knew this was one I wanted to read. Unfortunately, it didn't live up to my high expectations and was sadly lacking in quite a few different areas.

So, the positives firstly, there was a lot of intricate details to the plot which I appreciated, but unlike some of the better thrillers, there is a classic case of overcomplicating the plot leading to a convoluted and sometimes confusing storyline. There are also a plethora of characters that are barely developed, so because of their lack of depth you find you don't remember their names or how they fit into the book. Rimington is a great writer and knows how to grab the reader, but I always feel that the espionage genre requires books to be exceptionally thrilling, page-turners. However, I felt it was sadly lacking in that department, too. There was not much going on for large chunks of the book, and I feel the author missed a trick with not executing this premise to maximum affect. The use of topical issues, such as our relationship with Russia could've created a tension that slowly ratcheted up the suspense aspects of the plot and led to a veritable thrill ride.

The topical nature of the plot needed more attention paid to making a fast-paced, intense read. Instead, it was pedestrian, cliched and rather clumsy.

Many thanks to Bloomsbury Publishing for an ARC. I was not required to post a review, and all thoughts and opinions expressed are my own.

A man lies dying in a hospital in upstate Vermont. The nurses know only that he is an academic at a nearby university but they have been instructed to call the FBI should anyone visit their patient.
News of this suspected Russian illegal soon reaches MI5 in London where Liz Carlyle has been contacted by a top secret source known as Mischa who is requesting a clandestine rendezvous in Berlin.
This is the first book I’ve read by the author. The attention to detail is very good but whilst it was well written it didn’t have me at the edge of my seat. The characters were slightly two dimensional & I didn't relate to them. The story stuttered at times & I found myself skimming through waiting for something to happen. What could have been a riveting enthralling read just fell flat

My honest review is for a special copy I voluntarily read

I didn’t get on well with The Moscow Sleepers. It felt rather formulaic and wasn’t well enough written to convince me of the characters or the plot.

The book is about possible Russian agents (“sleepers”) in the west and MI5 and related agencies’ attempts to uncover them and their activities, with her principal character, Liz Carlyle of MI5 at the centre of things. Stella Rimington obviously knows this world intimately, but portraying it convincingly in a novel is another matter. She has a slightly forced prose style, as though she hasn’t quite moved from official documents to a relaxed, flowing style of her own in fiction. Some stale usages and clichés crop up fairly regularly, like the character who, before going away, “had to get her ducks in a row first” for example, which I found off-putting.

There are an awful lot of characters, almost invariably introduced as they are travelling somewhere or waiting for something and thinking about...followed by a lengthy, sometimes very over-lengthy, potted history. All these rather clunky introductions made each one seem less like a rounded, real person and more like yet another slightly unconvincing character to keep track of. I began to mutter “Oh, for heavens’ sake” to myself when, even well into the novel, yet more new characters were introduced in exactly the same way, complete with physical description and biographical background. It gets very wearing.

Rimington does like to tell us things rather than show us, often at tediously painstaking length; there is none of the subtlety and tension of le Carré or the wit of Mick Herron, for example, nor even the slow, meticulous plot and character development of Gerald Seymour. Take this little extract, for example: “Liz window-shopped apparently aimlessly, though a close observer would have noted how she lingered at the fronts with large curved windows, and a professional observer might have concluded that she was using the windows to keep an eye on what was going on behind her. She seemed to conclude that nothing was amiss, for she turned with no hesitation into Stresemannstrasse.” Quite apart from the infelicity of the use of “conclude” twice so close together, it’s a terribly laboured description of something so easy and basic. It all got too much for me, I’m afraid.

All this made the book rather a slog for me. I found it pretty unconvincing throughout, it didn’t engage me and I can’t really recommend it.

(My thanks to Bloomsbury for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Stella Rimington may know her stuff but this is a surprisingly slow and staid novel: too much page space is taken up by faff about office layouts and what people are wearing and gossipy soap opera plots like matchmaking a heartbroken MI5 woman with a handsome CIA man... and the writing is of the pedestrian variety: "the knife in D's extended hand sliced through the protruding jugular as if it were soft butter... blood spurted through her fingers like water gushing from a broken pipe" - can a jugular vein 'protrude'? And two tired similes in two sentences which slow the cliched action down even further. A topical plot but it can't save the clunky, clumsy writing: 2.5 stars.

The Moscow Sleepers is the latest book in the Liz Carlyle series by Stella Rimington and it is a solid addition.

The story moves along at a reasonable pace with some good descriptions of trade craft and the conflicting demands made which is what you would expect with the author's background and experience.

The downside that I found with this book and most of the previous ones is that the main characters seem to be fairly one dimensional with any shades painted a bit too bluntly.

Overall if you want a reasonable easy read then this is a decent choice of book

I love good spy thrillers and read them voraciously and yet I had never read one of the previous nine books in the Liz Carlyle series.

I was looking forward to putting this omission right but however hard I tried - and believe me, I tried very hard - I just could not engage with "The Moscow Sleepers."

Stella Remington obviously knows everything there is to know about the world of espionage from her own personal experience and yet, and yet, to me the book never really took off, there was something missing.

Of tradecraft there was much evidence, and high impressive it was but of characters, there was very little.

I know from personal experience just how hard it is to write a book but in my opinion this book is just a bit clumsy and clunky and I found it hard to engage and I never really felt a connection or even a real sense of interest in any of the characters.

I will try another of her books but I found this just a bit insipid.