THE DIRECTIVE

Mike Ford has escaped from his criminal past to start a new life in Washington with a high paid job and an impending society marriage; or so he thinks.

Regaining contact with his con man brother brings him into the orbit of a plan hatched by powerful interests to destabilise the world’s financial markets, interests who are more than willing to kill to achieve their aims. Faced with no other choice Ford must return to his own ways and play a deadly game where the stakes are survival.

This is the sort of book that grabs hold of its readers on page one and rushes them through one hair raising scrape after another before landing them gasping and bewildered on page three hundred or so.

Quirk barely gives his readers time to draw breath and yet somehow manages to construct a plot that, given the shocks and scared of recent years, has about it a scary ring of being almost possible.

As McGuffin’s go a fax giving details of the latest deliberations of the Federal Reserve committee that sets interest rates for the world’s largest economy takes some beating, managing to be both powerful and utterly mundane. The way in which it is lifted from within one of the world’s most secure buildings and then used as part of a deadly double bluff is one of the neatest bits of trickery I have encountered in a thriller.

It will be a surprise to nobody when this original and genuinely exciting book is snapped up by Hollywood and turned into one of the big blockbusters of the summer after next.