‘It’ll be simple,’ Slade had said. ‘You’re just a messenger boy.’ To Alan Stewart, alone on a lonely road in Iceland with a murdered man in front of him and a mysterious parcel which Slade. Secret Service chief, had commissioned him to deliver in his car, it looked anything but simple. And that was only the beginning. Desmond Bagley’s new thriller is set in one of the most sparsely populated countries, and among some of the most dramatic scenery in the world, where communication in the wastes of the Obyggdir depends on wireless and transport on a Land-Rover’s ability to traverse impossible terrain. But the natural obstacles of boiling geysers, fast-flowing rivers, sheer cliffs, steep-sided valleys, are only a small part of what Stewart has to contend with as, aided only by his girl-friend Elin, he battles to carry out his mission on the one hand and on the other to stifle the suspicion that he has been double-crossed. His Russian adversary, like the tip of an iceberg, is perhaps only the part of the opposition that shows. And the contents of the small, vital parcel? That remains a surprise — for the reader as much as for Stewart in a finale of formidable power

Crime, like any other business, is conducted for profit. When someone figured out a way to make a profit out of engineering prison breaks, a new crime was born. The Freedom Trap deals with a highly organized gang of scarperers whose business it is to spring selected long-term prisoners who can afford the price. It was the rapid growth and spectacular success of this latest industry that prompted Long Mountbatten’s much-publicized investigation and report. But when rumours started circulating that Slade, the notorious traitor-spy last encountered in Mr. Bagley’s Running Blind, when he was jailed for forty years, was planning his escape from a top-security wing, M.1.5 felt they could not wait for the Home Office to take its usual lumbering action. Those dangerous scarperers must be smashed at all costs. And so the bait is clearly laid along a trail which starts in London, leading to a night of fireworks in Malta by way of Ireland and Gibraltar. The Prison trap is sprung all right, but the reader is immediately trapped more securely than any of the victims by the riveting twists and turns of what is easily Desmond Bagley’s most accomplished thriller to date