{"id":1409,"date":"2006-02-14T21:08:37","date_gmt":"2006-02-14T21:08:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/2006\/02\/contact_zero\/"},"modified":"2006-02-14T21:08:37","modified_gmt":"2006-02-14T21:08:37","slug":"contact_zero","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/2006\/02\/contact_zero\/","title":{"rendered":"Contact Zero"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk\/e\/cm?t=friday05-21&#038;o=2&#038;p=8&#038;l=as1&#038;asins=0340895586&#038;fc1=000000&#038;lc1=0000ff&#038;bc1=ffffff&#038;npa=1&#038;lt1=_blank&#038;IS1=1&#038;f=ifr&#038;bg1=ffffff\" width=\"120\" height=\"240\" scrolling=\"no\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" frameborder=\"0\" align=\"right\"><br \/>\n<\/iframe><br \/>\nDavid Wolstencroft was very successful with his first book <a href=\"http:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/weblog\/archive\/001082.html\">Good News, Bad News<\/a>. It was pretty well reviewed, and then had the book chosen to be a Richard &#038; Judy bookclub choice, which is never exactly bad for sales.<br \/>\nAs a co-creator of Spooks (you can&#8217;t miss this fact as it&#8217;s all over the cover, and there&#8217;s a special offer for the DVDs inside the back), he&#8217;s already set lots of action in MI5, so this time he chooses MI6.<br \/>\nFour &#8220;lilywhites&#8221; are involved in operations that go spectacularly wrong, and with their own government offering them no support, they&#8217;re forced to seek out the mystical Contact Zero &#8211; an organisation or person who can make spies disappear forever. They&#8217;re forced to go on something of a &#8220;quest&#8221; that leads them half way around the world, while various other powers are on their trail.<br \/>\nThis is good old-fashioned populist stuff, with plenty of action to keep the reader turning the pages, but nothing too deep. Comparison&#8217;s with Le Carr&eacute; are seriously misplaced (incidentally, aren&#8217;t we due a new Le Carr&eacute; by now?).<br \/>\nHowever, it&#8217;s pretty obvious that Wolstencroft&#8217;s publishers must have had a conversation with the man that when something like this:<br \/>\n&#8220;The first book did really great David, but have you seen who&#8217;s still top of the bestsellers? Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code. If you can find a way to get a bit of that kind of thing into the book, then you&#8217;d really have a blockbuster on your hands. You know, historical secret societies, a plot from A to B to C. You&#8217;ll sell millions.&#8221;<br \/>\nAnd so, while it is a pageturner, the comparisons are not to be made lightly. Where Brown insisted (and readers believed) that everything therein was true, Wolstencroft begins by telling readers, seemingly with a straight face, that the D-Notice Committee can censor books, and this is out of the author&#8217;s control. Thereafter, at points throughout the book, odd words, phrases and names are &#8220;blacked out&#8221;. It&#8217;s an unnecessary trick.<br \/>\nWorth a read? Maybe. But I&#8217;d wait for the paperback if I were you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>David Wolstencroft was very successful with his first book Good News, Bad News. It was pretty well reviewed, and then had the book chosen to be a Richard &#038; Judy bookclub choice, which is never exactly bad for sales. As a co-creator of Spooks (you can&#8217;t miss this fact as it&#8217;s all over the cover, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1409"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1409\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}