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