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.
A deep
cover operative goes off grid during an operation to bring down a high level
drug dealer. On the streets of London a renegade SAS man is on a personal
revenge mission.
MI5
tasks Dan ‘Spider’ Shepherd with handling both cases, a tough gig even for
someone with his unique skill set. One made even tougher by the realization
that Shepherd has as much to fear from some of his colleagues as well as his
adversaries.
Recent
events have made the opening of this latest Shepherd novel shockingly topical.
Even without that, Leather deftly works real life news stories and contemporary
fears into his plot to give it added realism.
The
action is relentless and rendered in an entirely convincing way. You can almost
feel every blow Shepherd lands in the bone crunching ballet of unarmed combat
as well as hear the crack of the bullets that pass too close for comfort.
Although
his physical capacities render him (in some respects), close to superhuman -
Leather never loses sight of the fact that Shepherd is very much made of flesh
and blood, and a man driven by his difficult past and wracked by doubts about
the future and the value of what he does.
This
is a hard as nails British thriller that moves effortlessly through global
locations without losing sight of the humanity of its hero.
Well
into his career Stephen Leather is proving to be one of the greats of the
thriller genre.
