It’s always good to get a new author in the thriller market to try out, and this was a story that had all the elements of a great story in the style of Frederick Forsyth. Just my cup of tea.
Beginning with a man being chased through the snow in Siberia in October 2020, and then moving back to 2013, and a deadly assault by the French Foreign Legion on a series of caves to capture the man leading Al-Qaeda in Mali, the book barely gives the reader a break. The story really begins, I suppose, with “Part Two”, when Jeremy Carter, a successful banker, is climbing into his Jaguar to take his son to rugby training. His chauffeur, Charlie Lewis, drives, and they make their way through the Saturday morning traffic to Barnes.
But that morning everything goes to pot. The car is attacked, in a scene that is truly gripping, the boy manages to escape, the banker is captured, and taken away. And the police swing into action.
Except this is not merely the kidnap of a banker. We are soon introduced to Maguire, from MI5, who has an interest in the matter. He wants to get Jeremy Carter rescued, and he knows he has little time, because Carter is not a hostage held for ransom - he has secrets in his head that terrorists would kill to discover.
Maguire has to use someone who is “deniable” to get Carter freed, and he knows just the man: Dan Raglan.
I have read many of the better thriller writers, from Deighton, to Lyall, to Bagley, to Forsyth, and this is a very competent modern take on the genre. It is disappointing nowadays, often, to read the novels from the 1960s, because - well - the racism and misogyny is hard to swallow in these more enlightened days. But this is a great successor. Not only because the writing is precise and thrilling, but because it has a real emotional heart to it.
For me, I realised this was a brilliant story when the author took us to the home of the kidnapped man, to show how the children and the man’s wife were coping, and how the others about the family bore up under the strain. This writer has a great career ahead.
So, if you like the old-fashioned thriller style, but with a modern feel, like me, you’ll be held spellbound by this book.
Highly recommended!
