Cold Kill

This book was riviting. I could not put it down. The author compares to Daniel Silver who is one of my favourites. It is not too descriptive and not repetitive. It makes your hair stand up on end. Very exciting and very thought provoking. This is really going on?? It was my first Stephen Leather read and I can't wait to get the rest of his books.

Since the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, we've seen that wretched place spiral ever downward into religious and tribal warfare perpetuated by fanatics for whom the concepts of compromise, tolerance and diversity have no meaning. In light of a relatively measured response by U.S. troops that seems unable to bring order out of chaos, it's troubling to remember that Saddam's methods, brutal as they were, managed to keep a lid on the region's endemic factional hatreds (just as Tito's heavy handedness kept rein on Yugoslavia, a nation of contrived borders if there ever was one and which harbored centuries-old blood feuds). COLD KILL should confront the reader with a question. How far do otherwise "civilized" Western nations and their servant governments need to go to prevent such violence from reaching home shores in the explosive-laden backpacks of extraordinarily dedicated Muslim jihadists? Perhaps Guantanamo Bay is just a genteel tea party compared to what's necessary. Here, ex-SAS trooper Dan Shepherd is now a Detective Constable with London's Metropolitan Police seconded to a special unit tasked with apprehending smugglers of drugs, explosives, illegal immigrants, and the like. Shepherd's current assignment is to infiltrate a ring importing bogus Euros. In the book's first few pages, we're introduced to a shadowy Saudi Muslim that travels the world on a British passport planning and unleashing the attacks of suicide bomber teams on infidel targets, the latest being Sydney, Australia. The terrorist mastermind plots in the storyline's background with relatively little text exposure as Dan does his thing. The reader expects the paths of the two to cross eventually, the only question is how. Indeed, it was the prolonged wait for this to happen through COLD KILL's first 300 pages, during Shepherd's relatively mundane undercover gig (as Tony Corke) and his daily interaction with his young son Liam, which had me thinking "4 stars". However, once the connection between the two threads was made and the action whipsawed back and forth in the concluding seventy pages between the London-Paris Eurostar and a secret interrogation suite beneath the U.S. Embassy, COLD KILL reached nail-biting, 5-star status. For me, a more interesting character than Dan was Charlotte Button, head of the undercover unit of the newly established Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA) that, by the novel's midpoint, is to co-opt Shepherd and his talents. Button, young, polished and ambitious, comes to her new post via MI5, to which she'd directly graduated after earning a double first at Cambridge. Charlotte is sharp, no doubt, but has no blood under her fingernails, so to speak. For her, foiling the Bad Guys is a game. Thus, we see her lose her professional virginity during a few hours spent at Grosvenor Square participating in a hard-ball inquisition that would've brought a smile of fond recollection to the Lubyanka's former KGB interrogators. At one point, author Stephen L