E.V. SeymourRecensioni

Wow! This was an incredibly well-written tense thriller with a plot twist that took me by surprise, big time. The characters were relatable and well developed. Seymour’s writing was superb. I will be reading more from this author for sure.

Thank you to NetGalley and Joffe Books for giving me the opportunity to read and review this book.

Well written thriller full of pace and action, with some romance, and some predictable moves coming ‘out of the blue’. The plan of the novel is quite simple: we keep following Paul Tallis, who has had a troublesome youth, has a brother who is his opposite (a bend copper and a racist), and has a bad name due to an incident where he shot a suspected terrorist, who turned out innocent. O yeah, he also had an affair with his brother’s wife, who was abused by her husband and works at forensics (always convenient). Anyway, everything falls in place in this thriller (no contradictions or good guys turning out bad – such a pity!), which is probably why it got such low scores on library.com. The interesting thing is that MI5 actually keeps a tap on the whole story, though it only starts to act for real towards the end. Seymour could have used that as a parallel plot (which is so popular these days that you’d almost expect it; all these editors and creative writing course mentors tell you to do the same thing).

Well what is it all about? It is about a UKIP type, racist, Britain for the British kind of movement with its own Nigel Farage (upper-class fat cat that claims to fight for the man in the street) and a dodgy illegal arm of cells that takes care of the street fights. MI5 wants to get to the bottom of the links between the illegal cells and its link to a ‘respectable’ right wing party. And that’s where a female lesbian operative comes in who blackmails Tallis into catching four foreigners on the loose (recently released from justified prison sentences and wrongly put out on the street instead of being deported). Tallis traces one cruel abusive character after another, allowing the writer to describe a dodgy underworld consisting of sadistic male women traffickers, female child traffickers amongst immigrant seasonal labourers, and a case involving human trafficking of refugees (perhaps ‘Traffic’ would have been a better title?) . Things go ‘wrong’, leaving a trail of (unintended) killings and incriminating evidence for our hero. The last case (‘exile’) involves a wrongly convicted gentle soul from Iraq – the good guy! And then the story takes a twist, where our hero finally starts to investigate who his commissioners are. Well for the rest, read it yourself.½

E. V. Seymour writes a hugely engrossing and entertaining novel that deals with some serious issues in this gripping thriller full of suspense and lies.

Molly, the daughter of a retired police officer, is devastated when her sister, Scarlet, is killed in a random accident following an argument that leaves Molly feeling horribly guilty. Scarlet's husband Nate, also feels responsible for other reasons, but, astonishingly, their parents, who doted on Scarlet, accept the accident at face value - so why is it only Molly who feels like it was a setup? As Molly searches for the truth, she discovers more and more questions and secrets than any member of her family including herself, would not wish to be answered or revealed.

E. V. Seymour delivers an unrestrained and exuberant story of family drama with a toxic concoction of police corruption, secrets, affairs, sex, drugs and deception. Everything eventually crash-lands around Molly as she unravels the story that follows one fateful moment many years ago that has haunted family and friends.

Her Sister's Secret is a cracking story and a book that I revelled in all the way through. It brought no disappointments and everything was beautifully wrapped up in the fabulous finale. A riveting tale of familial dysfunction, unscrupulousness and the burden of truth, I'm very happy to recommend this book.

I received a complimentary copy of this novel from Harper Impulse via NetGalley at my own request. This review is my own unbiased opinion.

As a thriller, this was rather dull. Not badly written but just dull.

Someone in Russia is working hard on a hit list and, as the body count mounts, Russian government officials are getting more and more nervous about the situation. One by one, those most guilty of brutalizing Chechens during the ongoing fight between the Russian military and Chechen rebels demanding independence, are being eliminated. Be they former generals, jailers or interrogators, someone has a list of the worst offenders, and he is checking names off that list at a steady pace.

But the Russians are not the only ones worried. The British government has managed to plant a Secret Intelligence Service agent so deeply within a fierce group of Chechen rebels that he has become second-in-command to the group's charismatic leader. Now his handlers have reason to suspect that Rufus Graham has gone rogue and may be directly involved in the Russian assassinations. Fearing the serious political crisis certain to erupt if the Russian government connects a British secret service agent to the killings inside Russia, the British government wants to bring Graham back to England.

Luckily, the agency has the perfect man for the job in Paul Tallis, an experienced MI5 field operative who happens to have been Rufus Graham's best boyhood friend. Tallis, unwilling to believe that the boy he lost contact with all those years ago could be guilty of what SIS suspects of him, agrees to bring Graham home - or to kill him if the worst is true and he refuses to leave Chechnya.

E.V. Seymour takes the reader deep inside a conflict during which the Russian army used horrific force against the civilian population in order to break the will of a people fighting for its independence. What she portrays is not pretty. "Land of Ghosts" is a story of brutality and torture from both sides of the conflict, but the behavior of the Russian invaders was particularly vicious. Russian soldiers used rape, torture, murder, and the burning and looting of villages as ways to discourage civilian support for the rebels they fought. Chechen rebels, on their part, were likely to brutalize and torture the Russian soldiers that fell into their hands.

"Land of Ghosts," however, is about more than men killing each other for political reasons. It is about friendship, love, and how people are changed by constant exposure to the horrors of war. Seymour peoples her story with interesting characters that include a newly minted Russian millionaire willing to help Tallis for the sheer adventure of it and the Chechen woman who prepares him for his mission while fighting her own expulsion from the U.K. Tallis even finds a bit of romance amidst the chaos of wartime Chechnya and grows close to the young Muslim who insists on helping him negotiate his way through the dangerous landscape he must cross.

Even those for whom "Land of Ghosts" is their first Paul Tallis book, will come away with a good understanding of what makes him tick because Seymour provides the backstory and side plot associated with a good standalone novel. Much in the tradition of James Bond, Paul Tallis achieves the seemingly impossible over and over again, surviving situations that often do in the lesser men around him while he moves one square closer to his goal. That kind of thing is built into this genre. If you are a fan, you already know that and will not want to miss this one.

Rated at: 4.0

Trust No One used to be a favourite mantra in a previous life, so it gave me a bit of a smile to see that as the heading on the back cover of this book when it arrived.

This was one of those books that a few trusted reading compatriots had been discussing, so I thought I would buy a copy and see what I thought. This note is therefore a little less of a formal review and a little more of a memory jog for me, as I understand there is a subsequent book in the series (could be more by now I've not checked).

As the blurb says, Paul Tallis, in his role as an intelligence officer, shoots dead a suspected terrorist in an opening scene that is very reminiscent of the shooting of a suspect in the London Underground a while ago. In THE LAST EXILE, Tallis is suspended, and his career is dead, until a year later he is approached by a shadowy figure working for MI5.

This was one of those books that did a lot of setting up in the early part and it was a bit of a chore to stick with it until about one third in and things start to ramp up. Well worth sticking past the initial grind, this turned out to be a reasonably good thriller, with a nicely complex and flawed central character.