London Book Award Nomination Aly Monroe's: '[on Icelight] Steeped in a palpably awful shabbiness, pickled in austerity and shrouded in slimy yellow fog, Monroe’s sense of post-war London is astonishingly good.'

It’s been said that the crime and espionage thriller has gained respectability in recent years, after decades of being dismissed as so much pulp or escapism (as if pulp doesn’t have its own intellectual integrity). However, it still rarely receives the same reverence as literary fiction, which is a travesty – on one level because lit fic is becoming as increasingly bloodless as it is bourgeois and also because the crime novel is arguably the most significant genre when it comes to enquiring into the rotten state of our society. This is even truer of a period piece like Aly Monroe’s Icelight, which in many ways, unmasks and examines a society that produced the one we live in now.

Icelight is the third in a series featuring Brit Intelligence agent Peter Cotton. In the first book, The Maze of Cadiz, Cotton was on the wartime trail of an allegedly traitorous fellow spy amid the sun-scorched crumbling grandeur of the once-glorious Iberian city. The follow-up novel, Washington Shadow, found him in 1945 Washington investigating the break-up of America’s wartime intelligence agency. Icelight returns Cotton to home turf – specifically 1947 London. The suspense is inextricably tied up with the weight of post-war paranoia and prejudice: infighting in MI5, traitors at MI6, a Turing-esque atomic scientist subject to a poisonous homophobic witch-hunt. In trying to protect the latter, embark upon a hunt of his own and figure out who to trust, Cotton finds his own life at risk, and that some of society’s biggest villains are found among the ruling class (again, a historical detail with more than a little resonance for contemporary British society).

Steeped in a palpably awful shabbiness, pickled in austerity and shrouded in slimy yellow fog, Monroe’s sense of post-war London is astonishingly good: a world evoked by such subtle touches as the vile taste of burnt onions and tough meat and one character describing the insidious chill of their flat by saying that even her dog’s paws are cold to the touch. There’s also the subject of the birth of the NHS – a disquieting and au courant touch as it teeters on the brink in its sixth decade.