Poor Maggie Bird. All she wants to do is feed her chickens, drink good-quality Scotch, hang out with her secretive mates and try to forget her long lost love. Then someone starts shooting at her. It’s something to do with her long lost love. Luckily, her secretive mates help her keep one step to the left of the flying bullets, until there’s a twist, another twist and an almighty showdown. That’s what happens on the spy coast (and in other places), and it’s what happens in The Spy Coast, the first in a new series by Tess Gerritsen which, we understand, will tell the tales of a bunch of retired spooks who find rural Maine is not quite as out of the way as they’d hoped.

This is my first Gerritsen, and the pages flew past. The tale centres on Bird, a weary veteran of espionage. Now in her sixties, her knees might not be up to the running and jumping expected of our stereotypical agent, but her tradecraft is as good as ever. Indeed, as she keeps reminding us, as an older woman, she can be almost invisible in a crowd. She’s got a great inner voice, and much of the novel is told from her perspective. That’s just as well, as we hear her side of the tale of a disastrous spying mission to Malta many years ago, in which aforementioned long love was lost, but so were many others.

Bird didn’t work with her secretive mates back in Malta. Maybe they’re able to trust each other because their friendship was forged at spy school and not in the field. There are other former comrades where trust is either ambiguous or non-existent, transitory or transactional. Given that I’ve been recently watching the dramatisation of Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series (set in MI5 and with treachery and backstabbing on an industrial scale) this seems more urgent and perhaps more contemporary than your Flemings of old. But Maggie’s tale-telling is worn down by her knowing the compromises she’s made. It isn’t clear why you’d necessarily choose this as a line of work. Weirdly, what comes to mind is a line from GoldenEye, when Bond says to the traitor Alec Trevelyan that spying ‘was the job we were chosen for’.

Bird may be able to trust Declan, Ingrid and the others, but the barriers their circle erects around them mean that the relationships they build in their new-found community aren’t necessarily authentic, even if Bird’s prepared to put her own life on the line to protect one of them. By contrast, acting chief of police Jo Thibodeau is as authentic as they come, carved from Maine pine trees. She’s resourceful, determined and, if it’s not too patronising to say it, plucky. But it’s implied that she’s a bit of a stick-in-the-mud, refusing the bell peppers her father adds to her breakfast as they’re ‘just, um, different’. The former spooks run rings round her, though perhaps they will work together in future instalments of the martini club’s chronicles. Perhaps she will end up doing the running and jumping. In any case, she provides a change in pace from the retired spies (not that we tire of their company).

Gerritsen has a reputation for great story-telling and this didn’t disappoint. It helps, a bit, that the reader is happy in the spy genre to suspend belief. A twist didn’t really ring true, but then it got untwisted. I’m not sure why one character in particular behaves in the way in which they do, but it doesn’t matter. All you can ask for, at the beginning of a series, is that you wish to like the characters enough to want to spend more time with them, in their world. Just assume that your martini might be stirred, not shaken.

Thanks to Bantam for the review copy and to Anne Cater for the blog tour invitation.