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.
Operatives can come in from the cold, but can they come back to life? When an extraction operation in Oslo goes wrong that is a question Marc Danes finds himself asking. The target resembles a former partner, both personal and professional, he thought had been killed. Now she's back on the scene and looks to have gone rogue, called back into an uneasy partnership with MI6, Dane must find out the truth whilst battling powerful forces intent on destroying both him and the organisation he now works for.
This is the sort of thriller that grabs hold of its audience on page one and then drags them to hell and back across three continents over the next four hundred. Pitching its characters head first into one near death experience after another along the way, bones get crunched in almost every paragraph and the only escapes are the sort they make by the skin of their teeth.
James Swallow has a gift for creating mayhem that is dramatic and believable at the same time, no mean feat. If Dane and his team survive, just about, situations that would boggle the best CGI technicians, they always do so having paid a realistic physical or mental cost.
Away from the firing line Swallow creates an equally enthralling sub-plot around corporate intrigue and the long shadows cast by old wrongs. Blood on the carpet and blood on the sand all lead back to the eternal motives of greed and revenge.
He also writes with authority about the tangled relationship between governments, big business and 'security' companies in the developing world. A relationship that generates huge profits; and endless opportunities for corruption.
James Swallow has delivered again, giving his readers a smart and skillfully constructed ride into the world's dark places.
