Why a Booktrail?
1980s, 2001: A wicked game, a game of cat and mouse, where the goal is to kill your opponent.
Wicked Game
What you need to know before your trail
Robert Finlay is looking forward to a change of career. He works in the Royalty Protection team in London but is looking to work a less stressful role as he’s got a new family to think about.
However fate seems to have other plans. When two former Army colleagues from Finlay’s own SAS regiment are killed in separate attacks, Finlay realises that he himself could be next.
For Finlay is not the man that everyone thinks he is. His colleagues, new family and friends have one impression, but the real picture is a lot, lot different.
Now, Finlay must play a wicked game – and the odds are stacked against him for the unidentified enemy seems to be holding all the cards.
Travel Guide
Calcutta India
The novel opens quite literarily with a bang. The scene of a bomb blast in India where “the sweat, exhaust fumes and local spices combined to produce a pungent musty aroma” It’s definately the black hole of Calcutta. Bombs go off but the blast as is the moment is over very quickly- it’s the aftermath which is the horror.
Ireland (The Troubles)
Finlay is the man that was the least expected to join the SAS but he did, and his past has been formed inside the most risky world political situations. He was posted to Ireland during the troubles and has been injured onthe job. Ireland reveals the Troubles through the eyes of the IRA’s bombmakers too, how they worked before and during the ceasefire and the mercenary ways they have ever since. Insights galore into the troubles through the eyes of someone who worked behind the barricades:
“Terrorists – One might look like a schoolgirl , the other like a postman”
London – Stoke Newington
Finlay ends up working as part of a negotiator in the Iranian Embassy Crisis. Working in and around several barracks in London, he works whilst the IRA plant bombs and cause fear indiscriminately around the capital. The planning, the plan Bs, the nerves and the adrenaline – all neatly evoked so that you too feel the sweat on your top lip. They way they pick their targets, park the cars that will later explode, call the police with code words. A frightening insight into the planning which creates the senseless destruction
Booktrailer Review
Susan: @thebooktrailer
When I was first given a copy of this book to review, I did wonder if it would be my kind of read . What do I know about the IRA and the SAS and would I be able to understand it all? Well kudos to you Matt Johnson and I feel more than part of the team.Talk about a kick ass novel. From the very first page, I was shocked into holding my breath. It reads like an action movie but with all the bubbling tension in-between, some of it so quite and subtle that Matt lulls you into a sense of false security and then BANG! he thumps you, shocks you, jolts you into submission before doing it all again.
This was a world I had heard about on the news and from friends working in embassies etc but never have I read such accounts from the men and women working in the police, services or even the side of the terrorists. How their minds work, how they think justice is being done and what motives them? Tell you something, it makes you think.
I realise now that this is the book I’ve been missing – one that shows how government, big brother, call it what you will works, how one force works with another, how terrorists work and how authorities must work together to to and trap such a threat.
The bond between the soldiers was particularly nicely done – the funeral scene choked me up! The whole plot and pace were brilliantly done and if Hollywood action thrillers were half as meaty as this, I’d be at the front of the queue.
Bloody brilliant. Can I use that word in a review? It’s a book about the SAS so I think it needs a hard hitting punchy opinion to end on.
Where Next?
