Let me start by saying I enjoyed this book. I don’t want to say anything too specific about the plot as I want everyone else to make up their own minds.
One of the newspaper reviews described this book as “Dickensian” and I would have to agree. There is a large cast of characters and you wonder exactly how they will fit into the final denouement. For example there’s a junkie looking for his next fix. There’s also a nurse who’s just bought a dodgy car.
The most entertaining sub-plot for me was the court case where a couple of villains are looking at a hefty sentence and hire someone to tamper with the jury.
I never felt that I got inside the head of the suicide bomber. Then again it’s hard to imagine any author pulling that one off. Seymour does something clever by presenting us with a poignant thread through the book. We get to read the diary of an idealistic young Englishman who volunteered to fight in the Spanish civil war.
In the later stages of the book a representatives of the British and American security services decide to resort to extreme measures to extract information. This gives Seymour a chance to ask if you resort to such actions are you any better than the people you oppose.
In the end I felt the climax of the book is a little, well, anti climatic. But you can make up your own minds!