Tuesday, August 16, 2011

A DENIABLE DEATH

Gerald Seymour – Hodder & Stoughton - $34.99 
My Radio NZ Review with Kathryn Ryan today, 16 August 2011.

Gerald Seymour is one of the UK’s most accomplished and successful thriller writers with some 27 first class novels to his credit going all the way back to his first in 1975, Harry’s Game, now something of a classic in the genre which told the story of a British cabinet minister being shot by an IRA assassin and the undercover agent sent to track him down. I remember selling that one as a young bookseller in Napier!
Interestingly most of his books have been about terrorism, hit squads, undercover agents and the various secret services. Initially they were set in Ireland, the Soviet Union, East/West Germany but in recent times they have been most often set in the Middle East especially Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

On the cover of this latest title there are quotes from various UK press reviews saying things like “in a class of his own”, “one of the modern masters of the craft” and “the finest thriller writer in the world today” and I have to say that these are not exaggerations. Gerald Seymour is a superb writer with a reputation for highly detailed plots and great characterisation. A Deniable Death is no exception.

The eight page prologue is immediately capturing with its description of former soldier Doug Bentley representing his branch of the Royal British Legion in a funeral procession In Wootton Bassett in Wiltshire for a young soldier killed by a roadside bomb – an IED or improvised explosive device – which are responsible for more than 80% of Coalition casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We then meet Len Gibbons an unobtrusive man who works for MI6 who have just identified the Iranian engineer who is responsible for designing and making these IED’s. Although these bombs are regarded as peasants’ weapons because they are easy to place they are in fact highly sophisticated individually made electronic pieces and MI6 have decided on a highly risky operation to “take out” the bomb designer, known as the engineer, who lives with his wife and young family in a highly protected location close to the Iranian/Iraq border in the southern marshlands. His wife is suffering from a brain tumour and only medical services available in the West can provide the surgery needed to save her. This visit out of the country will provide MI6 with the opportunity to eliminate the engineer. But of course they first need to ascertain when they will be leaving and what their destination for the surgery will be.

To do this they need someone to get up close to the engineer to carry out covert surveillance. They need a “croppie” who will create a CROP – covert rural observation post. And this is where Danny “Badger” Baxter enters the story. In his career to date, he is 28 years old, he has spent much of his time in Northern Ireland and England spending days on end camouflaged and motionless recording criminal or terrorist activity. He is joined by and older partner, Joe “Foxy” Foulkes, who can speak Farsi and will thus be able to interpret anything they are able to record. They are delivered to their destination by a small elite military group and soon are suffering the heat and humidity of the mosquito and rat infested swamp in Iran in an ingeniously constructed hide only a hundred metres or so from the engineer’s home. 
This is no fun, they must maintain a 24 hour binocular and microphone surveillance so they have to take turns at sleeping, they can hardly move by day, a little more under darkness, they have to urinate into plastic bottles and defecate in plastic bags all of which have to go out with them when they leave as no trace must be left. The hugely detailed description of their intensely unpleasant, uncomfortable and difficult time in the hide left me gasping at times. All the time of course they know that if they are caught MI6 and the British government will deny all knowledge of them, hence the title of the book, A Deniable Death.

The story switches back and forth between the croppies and their support network in Afghanistan waiting to come and get them out, MI6 in London and the American and other security connections.
I don’t want to say anymore really in case I spoil the story for future readers but let me say that this is thriller writing as good as you will ever read, it is intelligent, tightly written, gripping from beginning to end and there are a dozen or so major, really well drawn and detailed characters in addition to Badger and Foxy. 

Such is Gerald Seymour’s skill that in the end you feel as much sympathy for the bad guy, the engineer (and his desperately ill wife), as you do for the good guys. I was moved and more than a little affected by this book, not an experience you expect from a post 9/11 thriller. It is 448 pages long, has a truly unforgettable climax, a book I couldn’t put down.
It will be a long time before the story and characters leave me.

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