Historically, ever since all those Edwardian novels about the malign intentions of the Kaiser, one of the functions of the adventure thriller has been to sell the author's opinions and fears about politics and war. Much of John Nichol's thriller is taken up with fluent infodumps about the strategic and economic importance of the Falklands islands--his hero is obsessed with measuring up to the heroism displayed by his older brother in the eighties and is interested in whatever anyone can tell him about the earlier conflict. Nichol is also keen to warn of the possible mechanism of another Argentinian attempt at winning the islands--his account is plausible at a purely war-gaming level. Though it is in some respects a lecture, Nichols never forgets that it is being sold and bought as fiction, and the incidents whereby the attempt is made and then frustrated are genuinely exciting. Sean and his navigator Jane rush around in desperate danger; Nichol has read and learned from not only Alastair Maclean, patron saint of this sort of thing in our time, but also from John Buchan--the terrain of the Falklands is, after all, the sort of moorland on which Richard Hannay had many of his adventures. --Roz Kaveney