In a wintry graveyard, a young man looks death in the eye and does not live to tell the secrets he holds. In Russia, the opening of a dusty archive reveals clues about a deadly game which has not yet reached its conclusion. In an isolated farmhouse, an old man is kept prisoner while his captors try to extract vital information from his rambling mind. Into this sticky web of deceit and intrigue stumbles Martin Teschmaker, a newly redundant insurance investigator who has just been deserted by his wife. Seeking relief from his mid-life crisis, Teschmaker contacts an old girlfriend, Jane Morris. With that one phone call he is plunged into an underworld where nothing and no one can be taken at face value. As he attempts to remove the masks, Teschmaker realises the truth is more complex and more dangerous than he could ever have imagined. And somehow he has to bring this deadly game to its conclusion, and survive

The Weekend Australian Edition 1 SAT 08 DEC 2001 Page R10

By: Graeme Blundell

SANDY McCutcheon (Delicate Indecencies, HarperCollins, 407pp, $27.50) writes political thrillers that underline the notion of corrosive international villainy and the fragility of civilisation in the hands of a shabby, miasmic intelligence culture. His trick is to weave the headlines of real life into fictional action, in prose dressed down to contemporary-bleak, with terrific dialogue and a travel writer's sense of place.

In his other life a distinguished broadcaster, the master storyteller embellishes the generic melodrama with idiosyncratic and telling detail.

McCutcheon has the enviable ability to create the illusion that his unlikely stories are probably true. Delicate Indecencies is about wintry graveyards, dusty archives, a newly redundant insurance investigator, the dogged Martin Teschmaker, recently deserted by his wife, a one-time KGB chief, Konstantin Laverov, weary with life and suffering a resurgence of Stalinist paranoia and rambling minds, and the trade in small, portable nuclear bombs missing from the ex-Soviet arsenal.

McCutcheon vaporises many of the woodenly familiar ideas that clutter espionage fiction, working in a literary welder's mask that enables him to handle dangerously hot material (his previous novel, Safe Haven, featured the now-famous and feared Muslim terrorist network al-Qa'ida, and the notorious Osama bin Laden) and his characters have ambivalence and authenticity.

McCutcheon has become the local master of the circuitous conspiracy genre of spy thriller.