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Readers' rating:
Published Mar 2007
448 pages
Genre: Thrillers
Publication Information
All traces of self-esteem have been brutally stripped from Malachy Kitchen, an Intelligence officer posted to Iraq. He is accused of cowardice while on patrol with an infantry platoon ambushed by insurgents. Word spreads that he ran under hostile fire. In the military family there is no worse crime. Humiliated and broken, kicked out of the army, Malachy sinks into despair. He becomes an isolated recluse in a drug-infested London estate. But the mugging of an elderly widow by addicts lights a flame that draws him to fight to regain his lost pride. His target is the network of narcotics traders. Pushers, dealers, suppliers are that network, and at their head is Ricky Capel, a crime baron importing heroin into the UK. Untouchable up to now, Capel will have to confront an enemy more driven than any of the policemen he has so far successfully outwitted. Capel is fighting a war on only one front, but when his Albanian associates demand that he uses his drug route to ferry an Islamic fanatic to Britain, suddenly he is vulnerable from other directions.
"The pursuit story is intricate and suspenseful, as Seymour's many fans have come to expect; in the redemption story, he nimbly avoids most of the cliches associated with the type (it's probably not possible to avoid them all). A thriller with a human side." - Booklist.
"Unfortunately, since Kitchen comes across as such a pitiful figure for most of the book, readers will find it hard to like or identify with him until they gain a full understanding of his situation." - PW.
"Complex, human, tense, engaged and - in all ways - wonderful. Nobody can touch Gerald Seymour." - Kirkus.
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Gerald Seymour was one of the UK's premier television news reporters. He was an eyewitness, up close and on the ground, to some of the epoch changing events of the last decades. Among them, he was on the streets of Londonderry on Bloody Sunday when paratroops clashed with Irish demonstrators. He was at the Munich Olympics and saw the agony of Israeli athletes held hostage by Palestinian gunmen and then the catastrophic failure of the German police to save them. He was in Rome in the cruel days when the Red Brigade captured Aldo Moro, a veteran politician, then savagely murdered him. His first novel, Harry's Game, was an instant bestseller and immediately established Seymour as one of the most cutting-edge and incisive thriller writers in the UK and around the world. Since then, his ...
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