As a spy-suspense thriller, The Holcroft Covenant is not in the tradition of rich, rounded characterization more typical of mainstream or major fiction.

The characters are stock types, with the interest being the plot, the way the problem confronting the hero-protagonist is solved.

Noel Holcroft is an essentially good, moral character with whom the reader is led to identify throughout the elaborate shifts of the plot. Born the son of a Nazi minister of finance, he is taken away as an infant by his mother, in the action before the inception of the novel's plot. The villain he essentially confronts throughout the novel is Johann von Tiebolt, aka John Tennyson, aka The Tinamou, a notorious international assassin. In this popular formula novel, the opposition of the main characters is very sharply drawn — von Tiebolt, a former Hitler Youth and would-be second Hitler, is as vilely evil as...