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Published Feb 2013
448 pages
Genre: Thrillers
Publication Information
The rules are simple. Break up your shape. Hide your smell. Never show your silhouette. Check the surfaces of your kit. Space the movements of your team. Use the shadows. Danny "Badger" Baxter has a talent for surveillance. He's always followed the rules. Until now, they've kept him alive.
But now Badger has a bigger job than photographing dissident Northern Irish Republicans in muddy Ulster fields, or Islamic extremists on rainswept Yorkshire moors. MI6 have a plan to assassinate the Engineer - a brilliant maker of Improvised Explosive Devices, the roadside bombs which account for 80% of Allied casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. The spooks know he's planning to leave his home in Iran. They just need to find out when and where he's traveling.
So Badger finds himself on the wrong side of the Iranian border, burdened with a partner he loathes, lying under a merciless sun in a mosquito-infested marsh, observing the house. If things go wrong, as far as Her Majesty's Government is concerned, his part in the plot is completely deniable. Gerald Seymour expertly explores the moral compromises of the secret world upon which we rely for our everyday security - and the amazing reserves of courage which ordinary people can find in extraordinary circumstances.
"Starred Review. Once the narrative gains momentum, it's hard to put this one down." - Publishers Weekly
"Seymour's painstaking attention to detail is a plus, as it gives the story an authentic ring and lets the reader experience the mission in real time." - Kirkus
"The three British masters of suspense, Graham Greene, Eric Ambler, and John le Carre, have been joined by a fourth - Gerald Seymour." –New York Times
"Not since the arrival of John le Carre has the emergence of an international suspense novelist been as stunning as that of Gerald Seymour." –Los Angeles Times Book Review
"[Seymour] isn't just abreast of the headlines, [but] ahead of them." - The Washington Post
"Seymour may be the best spy novelist ever." –Philadelphia Inquirer
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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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