DEAD MEN'S HARVEST

In this, the sixth Joe Hunter thriller, Hunter and his friends Rink and Harvey, find themselves on the back foot when something nasty comes (back) out of the woodwork: it’s Tubal Cain, the Harvestman, the most deadly of Hunter’s adversaries, and the one with the most serious grudge attitude ever. And he’s supposed to be dead.

First Rink goes off the radar, captured by underworld bad man Kurt Hendrickson on Cain’s orders. Then Walter Conrad, Joe’s former boss in the Arrowsake black ops days, along with his friend, Bryce Lang and two bodyguards, is reportedly slaughtered at his home in a way which points at only one possible perpetrator: Tubal Cain.

But, as always with Conrad, there are wheels within wheels. For one, the old man had lied to Joe about Cain’s death in the first place, and was keeping him alive in a maximum security prison. But that seems to have gone fatally wrong. Also, Conrad’s own ‘death’ has been faked, and it is made clear to Joe that Cain is after his brother, John, in revenge for what Joe has done to him in the past. Conrad is in hiding, keeping John safe.

So begins a rapid-fire series of jobs for Hunter: rescuing Rink from Hendrickson before Cain can get to him and administer his own special kind of cold steel-inflicted torture; finding Cain and eliminating him once and for all, and keeping safe someone else special to Joe – Imogen Ballard, sister of Kate, who was the great love of his life and who had died protecting Imogen.

With Rink badly injured – but safe – it is up to Joe and Harvey to go up against Cain and his various helpers, and the hunt for Cain soon turns into all-out war, especially when Joe’s sister-in-law, Jenny, is kidnapped by him and faces the worst possible fate at the hands of the knife-fixated madman.

With barely any let-up in the action, fans of Matt Hilton’s Joe Hunter series will not be disappointed at this latest offering. It’s fast, it’s furious, it’s filled with venom, and if there’s anything out there where readers will stay up to find out what happens to the nastiest villain ever, this is surely it.