The Appian Way

Kevin Catterall, a former tutor, has written numerous papers on anatomy, physiology and human biomechanics. The Appian Way is his first novel.

5 out of 5 stars
All Roads Lead to the Kremlin
By Chrissy Tuttle (Barcelona)

The Appian Way was built three centuries before Christ to connect Italy's southern coast to Rome. As one day they would say all roads lead to Rome, in Kevin Catterall's spy thriller, all roads lead to the Kremlin.

Set in Cambridge in the 1930s, four bright young things who join the communist party are drawn into a plot to overthrow western democracy and raise the Hammer and Sickle over Europe. Bursting with beautiful women, skulduggery at MI6 and fiendish spymasters with a taste for good brandy, we are taken through a web of setbacks and double crosses into a final reel that races along into a surprise ending.

If you're on a flight or long train journey, The Appian Way is a well-written, old-fashioned mystery that will keep you turning the pages.

5 out of 5 stars
Secrets, Lies & the KGB
By Mike Turner

There may be a Depression, the rise of Fascism and war on the horizon, but in Cambridge among the well-heeled students in the 1930s it's all cocktail parties, trips to the West End and boating on the river. It would all be a bit F Scott Fitzgerald like, vague and vain, but the four central characters in 'The Appian Way', apart from being glamorous and charismatic, are undercover agents for the KGB.

Spy tales set in this period are a well-furrowed field, but Catterall has found an original new take on the formula. Just as 'The Sopranos' is a family saga that happens to be set in the bosom of a Mafia family, the author here explores over the span of some forty years the lives and, more importantly, the hearts and inner lives of his protagonists.

One of the men, James Gosling, reaches the top of MI6, while Fergus Gilpaige, rival as much as friend, becomes the most powerful landowner in Ireland. What binds them is the utopian vision that attracted many young intellectuals in the thirties to the communist dream of equality and justice. In spite of the Soviet Union's obvious failings, where Gosling, Gilpaige and the others keep the faith, their children, growing up in the sixties, have a whole new ethos that conflicts with their parents' ideals.

Gosling's daughter falls in love with Gilpaige's son at the point when their fathers' are ready to stage the coup they've been planning, leaving both men the uncompromising choice between loyalty to the cause and loyalty to their families.

This is an intelligent, astutely planned novel with unexpected twists that hold you gripped, but it is the personal conflicts that make the reader care for the characters. The period detail is spot on and the conclusion is a real treat in the way that it gives you what you expect, but not in the way you expected it.