John Parker is a Graduate-qualified English/Spanish Teacher, owner and director of CHAT ENGLISH, an English Language Centre in Avilés on the north coast of Spain . A voracious reader, he has particularly loved horror fiction for many years.
Police Inspector Robert Finlay has recently survived an attempt on his life and that of his family. Now he finds himself recruited to investigate the Eastern European sex-slave industry.
The book starts off with a prologue in Romania, 1999. We learn about a young woman called Relia Stanga. She is a poor girl who manages to get a job at a glue factory and is eventually chosen to entertain well-off “city men”. Sickeningly, she is tricked into becoming a sex-slave. Two years later, she is murdered in London, despite supposedly being under police protection. She is the victim of a ruthless criminal gang who knew she was about to give evidence to the police.
Meanwhile, Finlay is sent to Egypt on an all-expenses-paid vacation where he stays at a hotel on the Red Sea. He thinks the holiday is therapeutic to help him recover from the terrible ordeal he suffered, as recounted in the previous book. But all is not what it seems and he has been set up by MI5. This trip will have repercussions on the job he undertakes upon his return to London, under the command of a new partner, Nina Brasov. Will Finlay be able to break up the criminal gang and will he be able to keep his family safe while doing it? Maybe, but it won’t be easy.
Matt Johnson has written a decent thriller which will keep the reader’s interest for the most part. Perhaps it would be best to read the previous novel, Wicked Game before this one. An early chapter gives a summary of what happened to Finlay, in the form of a police report. While the information is important for the plot, I found these five pages somewhat tedious to get through. Despite that, it’s a tale worth reading. It is not purely an action story as it deals with the aftermath of the last novel and the psychological affects it has on our protagonist.
