Jonas Merrick works in counter surveillance helping to keep the country safe and break any criminal enterprises. The set up is deftly drawn (drugs shipment due to land in Spain), the characters established early on but then not much happens for a very long time. I understand that this is the third book in a series - although I haven't read the earlier novels, I felt that this book worked just fine as a standalone. I think I've read all of Gerald Seymour's books but find this and the other Jonas Merrick books tough going. I felt that the author was attempting to go down the Frederick Forsyth/John le Carre route re espionage, but it didn't really come off.

My thanks to the Author publisher's and NetGalley for providing me with a Kindle version of this book to read and honestly review.It starts as a slow burner but the pace accelerates gradually into a shatteringly tense, exciting climax.

At times I felt a great empathy for his position, being almost ostracised from most of his colleagues. He always sets out good plots but his writing style is starting to irritate with his insistence on using three or four similes when one will do and how he painfully tries to avoid clichés. In Jonas Merrick, Seymour has created a fascinating, annoying and infuriating character everyone who has ever worked in a large organisation can relate to - the apparently irrelevant jobsworth who quietly and meticulously weaves his web and achieves results that surprise all of those who have dismissed him as a nobody. Character driven clever descriptive imaginative and intelligent, and totally engaging from first to last page, with the tension building with every turn of the page.Every Seymour novel is like a runaway train heading down a sloping track, steadily gathering pace until eventually it crashes, with inevitable consequences for the characters, good and bad, that he has introduced us to. In 1999, he featured in the Oscar-winning television film, One Day in September, which portrayed the Munich Olympics massacre. He soon finds himself at the centre of a network of informants, undercover operatives and contacts from a collection of police and intelligence services around the globe.