Spider Shepherd has to babysit two Asians who provided intelligence which enabled the Americans to find Bin Laden. At the same time he is called upon to go undercover as a black market weapons supplier to an extremist right wing group. Naturally nothing goes completely to plan and Spider finds himself improvising. Nicely detailed procedural interplay between MI5, police and other agencies. ( )

This next chapter in the life of Dan Shepherd is a different approach from the previous titles in the series. The story is told from a number of different voicepoints (very successfully I must add), and the conversations themselves are more political.

However, this does nothing to detract from the action-packed plot expected of a Dan Shepherd novel - False Friends is fast-paced and works well having Dan limited to a few locations. Dan's taking on board the role of handler in this book too and you can really sense his frustration at having to be behind the scenes for most of the story. I wonder if that set-up will last for the next book - to my mind, Dan's going to be like a caged tiger if Charlotte doesn't let him loose again!

Nice one Stephen - looking forward to the next book as always. ( )

After the murder of Bin Laden, al-Qaeda found a map of the compound where Bin Laden was living. Since it gave details of the inside of the compound, it had to be the work of traitors.

Finding and punishing the traitor became a first priority.

In England we meet Malik and Chaudhry, two idealistic Pakistani's. They discuss how terrorism is hurting their homeland and hurting how people feel toward Muslims.

Dan "Spider" Shepherd is the British Intelligence operative in charge of Malik and Chaudhry. He knows it is dangerous for them to stay in the field but they've learned that there is a new plot against England and Dan wants them to stay in place until he can find out the details of the new operation.

There is also a side story about a group of right wing people trying to purchase a large quantity of heavy weapons. They want to stage an operation against Muslims and feel that it is Muslims who are creating unrest in England and shouldn't be allowed there.

Even though there were parts of the story that had flaws, it was still a most entertaining novel. It was reassuring to read the words of moderate people of the Muslim religion and see how they were trying to do things to keep peace and get people of different religions to work together. ( )