Adam Colclough lives and works in the West Midlands, he writes regularly for a number of websites, one day he will get round to writing a book for someone else to review.
When two masked gunmen wipe out an elite police unit in an attack on a London pub they make a deadly mistake: leaving Mark ‘Heck’ Hecklenberg alive.
Suspended from the Met and under investigation by his former colleagues Heck is determined to avenge his dead friends at any cost. The journey to do so takes him from London gangland, through the industrial wastelands of the North, to the wilds of Scotland. There he encounters a crime syndicate more brutal than anything even he has faced before.
There are tough maverick cops, and then there is the tungsten hard version crested by Paul Finch. The difference when the gloves are off and the rule book in the bin is as wide as that between a banger and the atom bomb.
In this latest instalment, as would be expected, the action is both relentless and bruising. The climax is made all the more dramatic by being played out with one of the most dramatic landscapes in the world as a backdrop.
Finch pays close attention to the tools of the trade of violence, not just in the expected way writers in the genre note the capacities of a gun or a knife for a readership avid for detail. He is fully aware of their capacity to do harm, both to the person hit, and the one pulling the trigger. This lends an extra level of authenticity to the resulting carnage.
Finch also asks an interesting moral question in this book, in previous outings there has always been something of the time bomb about Heck. What will happen now the fail safes that have previously stopped the clock before the hands reach twelve are no longer in place? Just how thin is the line between being a maverick on the side of right, and the sort of person they are best placed to hunt?
Answering those questions potentially opens up a new chapter both for this series and its main character.
