Customer Reviews

Rat Run

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Gerald Seymour is one of the most prolific thriller writers. He's written over twenty books in thirty years and has still managed to maintain the same level of qaulity with his newest.

In Rat Run, a disgraced British soldier and veteran of Iraq, where he underwent a particularly bad experience,which is told in flashback throughout the narrative, indifferently tries to maintain some semblance of a life. When his neighbor is attacked, he becomes personally motivated to go after a drug network, setting his sights higher in the hierachry of the organization with each successive act until he crosses paths with a Secret Intelligence Service team pursuing an al-Qaeda terrorist who is going to activate sleeper terrorist cells inside Britain.

Seymour is an absolutely wonderful writer, comparable if not superior to even Clancy and Forsyth, and Rat Run demonstrates his talents of creating a cast of varied, multiple characters and fully fleshing them out and leaving no gurantees as to the outcome of the story or who will survive. I've read several authors, though while good, they often fail to make me actually care about the characters, and that's what drives Seymour's books.

Gerald Seymour is the genuine article. Any number of reporters graduate to thriller writing, but few know their business as well as Seymour. His beat covers the British police and security services as well as the military, and he has a deep appreciation for the isolated pockets of professionalism in the face of bureaucratic apathy, political cynicism, and societal decay. His style takes some getting used to: snapshots tossed at the reader with seemingly unrelated characters and incidents, all eventually brought together in a satisfying denoument. All of his books are pretty good and some are classics -- there are few better novels about urban guerrilla warfare than Field of Blood, about the IRA in Northern Ireland in the 1980s. Rat Run is in the "pretty good" category. One warning -- Seymour is a thoroughgoing pessimist who paints a despairing picture of modern European society besieged by crime and terrorism. His protagonists are usually marginalized and occasionally disgraced public servants, soldiers, and policemen fighting a doomed rearguard action against the forces of chaos. In Seymour's books the good guys win battles, but he clearly thinks they are losing the war.

Gerald Seymour is the only author whose thrillers I savor slowly, both when I contemplate them with delicious anticipation sitting on my shelf awaiting my attention, and when they're being read with the impossible wish that they never end. RAT RUN is the twenty-third offering in a string of books remarkable for their consistent ability to enthrall.

The central villain of this piece is Ricky Capel, who imports heroin into the UK using his brother-in-law's fishing trawler to retrieve caches of the drug attached to a bouy's anchor chain in the North Sea, the heroin being put there by a Hamburg underworld organization headed by the Albanian arch-criminal, Timo Rahman. From Ricky, the drug moves down the chain to the supplier, then the dealer, and finally to the street sellers, two of which vend to the vagrants in the blighted and crime-ridden Amersham housing estate, the home to Malachy Kitchen.

Malachy was once an Army intelligence officer, but was drummed out after being accused of cowardice while on a combat patrol in Iraq, when he apparently deserted his unit after discarding his helmet, flak vest and rifle. Now, disgraced, divorced, psychologically broken, jobless, and reclusive, he lives in Amersham on the public dole, his only friend an old lady, Millie, who lives in the next door apartment and who invites him to tea twice a month. Then, one day, Millie has her purse stolen and is brutally beaten by the estate's two drug sellers. Millie's nephew, an officer with the Criminal Intelligence Service, challenges Kitchen to regain his lost pride and manhood by taking the sellers out of circulation in a manner not open to official law enforcement. Malachy does so, utilizing remembered skills from his service days, and then begins to move back up the chain.

In the meantime, Rahman's organization is taking on a new sort of endeavor, which is to smuggle into England a key al-Qaeda operative, a "coordinator" being sent to activate terror cells comprised of English-born Muslim fanatics. But Frederick Gaunt of MI6, demoted to the Albanian Desk after SIS's faulty intelligence regarding Saddam Hussein's WMDs, has gotten a faint whiff of the plot from a cell phone transmission plucked out of the ether. Gaunt puts his newest agent, young Polly Wilkins at the Prague station, onto the trail of the shadowy Arab as the latter makes his way across Europe's national borders on the clandestine "rat run". Polly herself is on an emotional low, having just been dumped via email by her erstwhile boyfriend, an officer of Her Majesty's Foreign Service stationed in Argentina.

Polly's assignment and Malachy's quest for private redemption cross on a storm-battered beach on an island off Germany's northwest coast.

The brilliance of all of Seymour's plots is that there are no super heroes, only common and unremarkable men and women, sometimes as damaged as Malachy, doing thankless jobs at civilization's grittier and grottier margins, where opposing forces aren't colored so much in black and white as murky shades of gray, and victories, such as they occur at the novels' conclusions, are pyrrhic and fleeting, and a defeat is perhaps only postponed. But the reader will sense that what is fictionally depicted reflects the real battles in the real world which are fought below the public radar.

If you're into visual comparisons, the difference between Seymour's stories and those otherwise excellent tales in the genre by other contemporary authors is that between the refreshingly intelligent film adaptations of the John le Carre novels, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley's People (both starring Sir Alec Guiness) and, say, any James Bond film (even those starring Sean Connery). There's just no argument that the former aren't a superlative class unto themselves.

I now need to purchase Seymour's latest offering, THE WALKING DEAD, and I savor the experience.

I don't usually like novels told from multiple viewpoints. But, Seymour brings it off so well that I cannot imagine this tale told otherwise. A virtuoso performance by one the top current writers in the genre. I've not read all of his novels but this one is far and above his others. In fact, Rat Run places him far over competition such as Frederick Forsyth and the 2 Davids Silva and Ignatius. IMHO Rat Run jumps him into Le Carre's league. Le Carre's early, best writing, I mean. Another reviewer complained Seymour "is a thoroughgoing pessimist who paints a despairing picture of modern European society besieged by crime and terrorism." I say Seymour tells it like it is and the powers that be would be wise to heed Seymour's warnings. Highly recommended. I could not put it down.

I am old enough to remember Gerald Seymour as one of the first I.T.N news readers but ever since his first book I have regarded him as my top thriller writer. His first book was in troubled Northern Ireland. Over the years his books have mirrored contemporary theatres of action. Rat Run takes us to the world of combat in Iraq, drug ridden London housing estates and the latest terrorist threat. Once I start a Seymour I know i will not be able to put it down. This is no exception. A thrilling read but not a very pleasant ending. That is what makes Seymour so realistic. The real world does not have tidy finishes.

After reading the boring Unknown Soldier, I was pleased to find this a big improvement. The hero of the book (Malachy) is a former officer that was guilty of cowardice a few years ago and became a Down and Out due to his inability to mentally cope with it. He finds motivation in the form of hunting drug dealers/pushers, buyers and suppliers. The first half of the book is great fun as he's going after the minnows but, when he starts hunting bigger fish, it does slow down a lot and I think becomes too complex for the fast pace it needed. There's too much jumping back and forth between different characters and it slows it down too much and has you flipping pages. Ricky Capel plays the UK drug lord who has a lot of presence at first but ends up too much of a twit to be a good villain. The unnamed terrorist is built up to be a better foe but Malachy never gets to grips with him which was disappointing. It reads rather like a good idea that became too complex for it to work well in the latter stages. 560 pages when it should have been 300.