Bernard Samson, the quintessentially cool, cynical British Secret Service agent, is back in the splendid first book of an espionage trilogy: Hook, Line, and Sinker. And we are back in the mazes of Secret Service mystery and intrigue, mazes that now lead into Samson's own tangled past.

Once a field agent in the dangerous byways of Eastern Europe and now relegated to an administrative backwater at London Central, Samson has become, in his own words, "the dogsbody who got the jobs that no one else wanted." But now he's got something else as well: information that he might be better off not knowing, information about a huge financial scam that has erupted within the Service. Millions of pounds have disappeared. And what Samson learns is so confounding that he cannot resist pursuing it far beyond the tight perimeters of the official investigation. Zigzagging across two continents, Samson begins to question the behavior of the very people he's come to depend upon, people who appear to regard his behavior as paranoid. There's no question in his mind that he has "enough work and enough enemies without looking for more" but suspects that he may be on the trail of the most damaging breach of security the Service has ever suffered.

What happens is brilliantly told as the tension mounts and as Deighton, writing at the top of his form, gives us the riveting and superbly suspenseful beginning of his magnificent trilogy.