I quote from an Amazon review: Alex Reeve, operative 66 agent of the secret organisation SC9, has been wrongly accused of treason and lives in Italy under a new name, but his opponents manage to track him down. He has material (on a memory stick) which could blow open deep knowledge of the clandestine organisation's trail of assassinations.
Far-fetched. That's the word (or hyphenated two words) I grasped for after finishing this thriller. I noticed on the page opposite the title page it gave a list of Andy McDermott's novels so far. There are 15, plus a digital short story, relating the exploits of Nina Wilde and Eddie Chase. The titles could easily have been from Scott Mariani's Ben Hope series - or the thrillers of Raymond Khoury and Chris Kuzneski. I see this was only the second featuring Alex Reeve and can only assume this is the start of a new series. I think it probably would have helped to have read the first novel, Operative 66, to get more of the 'back story' to Reeve. As it was, the reader had to take as read the hatred that Reeve had for his father, the set up of SC9 (well into the book we find out this refers, mundanely, to the room along the corridor - South wing, floor C, room 9 - in a block run for the Office for Interdepartmental Communications [OfIC] ), headed by its fanatical megalomaniac Sir Simon Scott, and the ambivalent Tony Maxwell, who wants to succeed Scott.
All this fits into the usual thriller style. However, the just-about-possible exploits of Jason Bourne, Ben Hope and others have jumped a further step, to highly unlikely or Mission Impossible. This is most palpable in the final pursuit of Reeve - in a slow-moving red-and-black hatchback Lancia Ypsilon - by a cadre of SC9 operatives, which lasts from page 348 to page 404. They use a silver 4 x 4 Discovery, a black 4 x 4 Discovery, a stolen Arbarth 124 Spider convertible sports car, and a stolen Suzuki SV650 motorbike to create havoc along the Italian autostrada. The writing is taut, tense, detailed - and descriptive of the impossible! Haring up a three-lane motorway, then a two-lane dual carriageway with no hard shoulder, against the flow of heavy traffic, Reeve finally gets to Venice, only to be catapulted off a bridge into the water. He survives to kill one of the most fanatical of operatives, Blake. As Scott exploded: He's just one man. How the hell have you not killed him by now? Three other operatives have lost their lives in the chase and, now, Scott himself is shot dead by Maxwell. Everyone seems to have remarkable powers of recovery - from beatings, fisticuffs, being shot at, car windows shattered - especially Reeve.
There are some believable cameos - Alison (Ally) Marks, one-time freckle-cheeked, curly-haired tomboy, Reeve's (or Dominic's) first girlfriend, still with a torch for him and willing to hide him away; Micky Rowland, his best mate as boys, now turned drug courier and rotten to the core; Deirdre Flynn, one of the operatives, keen and dedicated; and Garald Kazimirovich Morozov, member of the SVR, successor to the feared KGB, who worked for the Directorate S: the Illegal Intelligence department, whose job was simple - eliminate enemies of the Russian state. Both Flynn and Morozov are destined to die for their causes, by the machinations of Reeve.
McDermott is also quite good at delineating the inter-service rivalry between MI5, MI6 and GCSQ; but the dominance of Scott and the fictional SC9 is hard to take. There is a feeling that the ending is being twisted to make way for another book in the series. Maxwell is now head of SC9 - his view of Reeve? - Leave him alone...there was no reason to disturb the status quo. Unless Reeve himself disturbed it. Reeve decides to part with his girlfriend Connie, to save her from SC9 or the Russians. To be linked up with Jason Bourne, or Ben Hope or Alex Reeve (in fact, really Dominic Finch) means trouble or the worst.
I read the book in two sittings - light relief in a way, but every so often I had to murmur not possible!
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