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Seymour, Gerald - 'Timebomb'
Hardback: 448 pages (June 2008) Publisher: Bantam Press ISBN: 0593060059

Hard on the heels of last year's brilliant thriller, THE WALKING DEAD, comes this excellent, new multi layered novel.

It is during the end of Soviet Russia in 1993, when it was entering its Glasnost era, that it had to eliminate some of its debts which mainly consisted of having one of the largest armed forces on the planet. It had huge numbers of senior officers who nearing the end of their working lives and were expecting to be pensioned off but the USSR just couldn't afford it. Instead they were just fired and joined the rest of the hungry population.

One such embittered officer was Major Oleg Yashkin who had 32 years of service and felt that as he was going to be let go, he would take something, a souvenir of his job to perhaps use in the future, when he needed some money and so he took a nuclear bomb(!), which he buried in a marked location.

In 2008, fifteen years later, Yashkin and an accomplice dig up the bomb and drive with it in the back of a truck to a location in Eastern Europe where they expect to meet the representatives of a Russian ethnic criminal organisation and to sell them the bomb for a million dollars. However, British intelligence get wind of the plan and infiltrate the criminal organisation with one of their agents, Johnny Carrick.

Backup for this agent is provided by veteran Christopher Lawson of MI6 accompanied by some specialist helpers following in a minibus. The thrills and action in this fascinating cloak and dagger story pile on and the author keeps the suspense of what will happen almost until the last page.

This is the authors 25th book but the quality is even better than his earlier efforts. Because he was originally an ITV journalist with experience of highly detailed research the standard of his work is so much greater than his peers. I hope Gerald Seymour continues to write work of such high calibre for many years to come.

Terry Halligan, England
July 2008

Details of the author's other books with links to reviews can be found on the Books page.
More European crime fiction reviews can be found on the Reviews page.



last updated 26/06/2011 15:06