Spy who made PTSD into a page-turner
CAPTURE OR KILL by Tom Marcus (Macmillan €15.65) THIS debut from a former MI5 surveillance operator is one of the most exciting I have read in a long time.
The author left the security service suffering from PTSD in the wake of ten years ‘undercover’.
His memoir of those years became a bestseller and now he has turned his hand to fiction, to great effect.
He tells the story of Matt Logan, an MI5 officer serving in the front line of counterterrorism, who becomes increasingly exasperated with the political correctness that prevents him and his colleagues from stopping atrocities that seem bound to happen.
Out of the blue he is asked to join a unit so ultra-secret they deny they exist — in pursuit of two brothers, known as Iron Sword and Stone Fist, who are planning a major terrorist attack.
Every page rings with authenticity, the tension is superbly sustained, and the central character is all too believable: a man wary of the power to kill. THREE LITTLE LIES by Laura Marshall (Sphere €14.95) A SECOND novel from the author of the bestseller Friend Request a year or so ago confirms her as a name to watch in the world of twisty, gripping thrillers from a female perspective. Cutting back and forth in time, it charts the relationship of two girls who grow up together and share a flat ten years later. One of them, Sasha, suddenly disappears and the other, Ellen, becomes convinced that something dreadful has happened. The pair have been witnesses in a rape trial involving a friend, Daniel Monkton, who was sent to prison. He always maintained his innocence — but they helped convict him. And now he is out of jail. Has he abducted Sasha, or worse? Were Sasha and Ellen absolutely certain about what they saw a decade earlier?
A striking portrait of two young women, as well as the examination of what being involved in a rape trial can mean to witnesses as well as the accused. BITTER SUN by Beth Lewis (Borough Press €18.10) IT IS the hot summer of 1971 and, in the small mid-West town of Larson, four teenage friends find a young woman’s body. The local sheriff suspects them of being involved in her death, but nothing is proven and the mystery of who she is and who could have killed her remains in their minds.
A year passes, and the small town is gripped with antiVietnam fever spreading across America as it watches its sons fail to return from war, or coming home wounded in mind and body.
Wonderfully evocative of the onset of adolescence, with a mystery and smalltown corruption at its heart, this thriller is written with a heart-breaking intensity that lingers in the mind.