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.
Trouble has a habit of finding ex- SAS operative Ben Hope. A chance encounter with a terrified young woman in a Paris street sees him dragged into a new mission. One that involves stolen antiquities, a terrorist plot and the return of an enemy he thought had been killed years before.
Like father of the modern thriller Frederick Forsyth, Mariani has a knack for imbedding his plots in the fears and preoccupations of their time. Here that is the long shadow cast by terrorism since 9/11 and the lengths groups like ISIS will go to in order to achieve their aims.
In the high concept world of the action thriller, Mariani’s narratives have a high level of realism that unsettles the reader.
The action scenes come thick and fast, each one choreographed with painful authenticity. As ever, Hope makes for an action hero an upper cut above the crowd, as adept with his brains as with his fists and possessed of an old school sense of honour.
It might be a bit soon yet for the grand old man of the genre to give up his crown, when he does though Scott Mariani could be a deserving successor.
For now, he goes from strength to strength, making our collective flesh creep with things that all too easily could happen.
