It starts as a slow burner but the pace accelerates gradually into a shatteringly tense, exciting climax.

Every Seymour novel is like a runaway train heading down a sloping track, steadily gathering pace until eventually it crashes, with inevitable consequences for the characters, good and bad, that he has introduced us to.

At times I felt a great empathy for his position, being almost ostracised from most of his colleagues. After thirty odd novels with different protagonists, it's perverse to have such a dull central figure for our first regular character. I appreciate that Gerald Seymour books are all about the gradual build up of tension but this was pedestrian and the pay-off not worth the wait.

This represents the third outing for Jonas Merrick, MI5’s querulous counter-intelligence data analyst. A very wordy book and till you get into it, quite confusing with the long chapters and chopping and changing of where the action is taking place. Character driven clever descriptive imaginative and intelligent, and totally engaging from first to last page, with the tension building with every turn of the page. But while Jonas’s colleagues regard him as scratchy, fastidious, old, he is also ruthless, cunning and brutally pragmatic. Contrary to what we might infer from watching Line of Duty, this area of work is considered a bit oif a backwater by everyone in the intelligence community.In the 3rd book in the series he is tasked in regards to an OCG (organised crime group) a sleepy backwater of SIS, out of sight and out of mind scenario. The set up is deftly drawn (drugs shipment due to land in Spain), the characters established early on but then not much happens for a very long time. My thanks to the Author publisher's and NetGalley for providing me with a Kindle version of this book to read and honestly review. I understand that this is the third book in a series - although I haven't read the earlier novels, I felt that this book worked just fine as a standalone. All told, I left the book with a feeling of disappointment due to both the warm recommendation and the reputation of the author from his ITN reporting days.

This is the third book in this excellent series featuring the totally believable and ever so endearing Jonas Merrick. I wonder how far Gerald Seymour can extend this series before the personality of Merrick becomes so odious to the reader that they can’t take any more. The amazingly boring gray civil servant Jonas Merrick turns out in an unbelievable fashion to be the real James Bond. With his trademark, slow-burn story - ultimately slight in nature - and a largish cast of well-drawn characters, expertly executed.I think that he could have trimmed a little from it as it seemed to take an eternity to get to the end point and by that time I was not invested enough in any of the characters to really care very much. I did wonder that if this manuscript had come from someone without this reputation, would Hodder and Stoughton have been so keen to publish? so we can see Jonas adapting to new - and difficult - circumstances as a widower, whilst continuing his Eternal Flame duties.

In 1999, he featured in the Oscar-winning television film, One Day in September, which portrayed the Munich Olympics massacre. The plotline of this latest novel from Gerald Seymour is excellent, multi-national criminals involved in drugs smuggling become the focus of multi-agency efforts to prevent them from succeeding under the direction of Jonas Merrick from his desk in Whitehall. As usual in my reviews, I will not rehash the plot or the publisher's blurb - instead I highly recommend that you read this for yourself. My favourite character was the "hero" Jonas Merrick, a beautifully understated "conductor", masterminding events from his nondescript backroom lair.He always sets out good plots but his writing style is starting to irritate with his insistence on using three or four similes when one will do and how he painfully tries to avoid clichés. He is something of an anti-hero, who cares little for his perceived persona but a great deal for the team he directs into danger.