This was SO BAD, and not even so bad it's good. While not quite the target market for this stuff, I do enjoy mercenary/adventure films and novels (Predator is one of my favourite films, and I've read a lot of Lee Childs for instance). But this...this...it's the sort of novel where a character (who you already know is a former IRA boy who's turned on his former masters to become a gun for hire) walks out of a church through a Judas gate, stops on the way and says: "It's appropriate, don't you think, especially for someone like me? Judas was a political terrorist called a Zealot, and my branch of the great game was the IRA". That's how hard men speak in Higgins world, and there's tonnes more just like it. The way his characters talk makes the dialogue in that Essie Fox book I recently slagged off seem like a series of elegant Zen koans. Though the priest's response ("Such talk is pointless, Sean") is definitely fair comment.

Now, if this book were a rollicking roller-coaster of explosions, bomb scares, fisticuffs and sex the talk would barely matter. But it's really boring. 13 books into his series about Sean Dillon, Higgins doesn't seem to have a handle on anything that makes the man tick, apart from the most broad motives (he's pissed off because his buddy got killed, he's implacable, he's good at killing people). Nor does Higgins (assuming it was even him writing by this point) give much of a fuck about weapons or surveillance technology. The cyber stuff is referred to in the vaguest possible terms, and everyone is acting like a bulletproof vest is some kind of revolutionary new technology (we are in 2005 here).

What you do get is plenty of obsessive references to alcohol. Whenever the men (and glamorous Russian Major Nika Elastika, or whatever she's called) aren't in the middle of killing someone they drink and smoke, swilling down spirits and champers in the kind of quantities that make a mockery of the Withnail and I drinking game. And I think Higgins has quite an emotional attachment to cars, too, because he refers to them by their full capitalized names again and again (even if it's People Carrier). On the plus side, I enjoyed the titbit about the Algerian salt marsh that is home to special swimming horses, and I did find what Higgins wrote about IRA sleeper cells in London quite interesting, though I have no idea if it's true. And that's truly it for the positives.

Obviously by this point Higgins was getting on a bit and had spent a considerable part of his career blatantly recycling former works, so maybe it's unfair to judge his earlier work by the quality of this book. But I can think of really old authors who kept cooking on gas right up until their death (some of Reginald Hill's last books feel like they were written by a randy bisexual twentysomething who's somehow acquired the knowledge of a sixty-year-old man, and very good they are too) so I'm not inclined to let Higgins (or his publishers) completely off the hook. Everyone involved in this should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.

slams down tumbler on black and red marble countertop Mine's a gin and It.