After a somewhat slow start this turned into a really interesting and gripping book and I found it difficult to stop reading. Just one more chapter, and then I will go to sleep. Well, perhaps just one more ...The main characters are well drawn and feel fully fleshed out and even the main villain does not feel like a comic book character. The crisis that the characters find themselves in seems feasible and, perhaps above all, the politics feels like exactly what would happen in this kind of situation with the political masters trying to cover their butts and having a difficult time coming to any firm decisions.The book is also full of British terminology which I, who thought I was familiar with British terms, find a bit puzzling. Fortunately the Kindle reader provided the proper definitions. Still terms like "trug" and "four-ways" were a bit baffling at first.There is also an issue with some formatting with entire sections being displayed in narrower columns than normal, and there are many hyphenated words that need not be hyphenated. That is, it appears that when the book was converted from print to electronic format words which were split between lines, and hence hyphenated, were just copied as they were, hyphen and all, onto formatted lines so that they remained hyphenated when it was no longer appropriate. I have removed a star because of this formatting issue as it is very annoying and very common.Other than the formatting and hyphenating issues this book is a nearly perfect thriller, and I liked it enough that I plan to buy the next book in the series.