{"id":1201,"date":"2004-07-04T22:44:17","date_gmt":"2004-07-04T22:44:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sunpig.com\/mt-entry-1201.html"},"modified":"2006-12-30T16:27:16","modified_gmt":"2006-12-30T16:27:16","slug":"adam-hall-the-mandarin-cypher","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/2004\/07\/04\/adam-hall-the-mandarin-cypher\/","title":{"rendered":"Adam Hall &#8211; <i>The Mandarin Cypher<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I went through the whole of Adam Hall&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.quiller.net\/\">Quiller<\/a> series about five years ago when I was on an espionage kick.  The books are pure high-speed secret agent escapism, and a quick dose of Quiller action was just what I needed to stir myself out of my current reading funk.  <i>The Mandarin Cypher<\/i> is the first of the series I read.  Upon re-reading it now, it has lost a bit of its sparkle, but none of its pace.  Hall&#8217;s matter-of-fact stream-of-consciousness patter is great for keeping the plot moving and the pages turning.  I always found Quiller&#8217;s Russian adventures the most engaging, but his outing to Hong Kong here has all the tense elements I remembered:  hard targets, hard opposition, and impossible situations aplenty.  If you want a throwaway afternoon thriller, you just can&#8217;t beat this stuff.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I went through the whole of Adam Hall&#8217;s Quiller series about five years ago when I was on an espionage kick. The books are pure high-speed secret agent escapism, and a quick dose of Quiller action was just what I needed to stir myself out of my current reading funk. The Mandarin Cypher is the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[1142],"class_list":["post-1201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books_35_stars","tag-legendshome"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1201\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}