Gerald Seymour has been entertaining us with adventure/crime/terrorism/military fiction in 32 novels since 1975. His latest is Jericho’s War. The summary is as follows. The occasion will demand nerve shredding courage that will affect many thousands of lives. A handful of men and women will converge on a barren stretch of Yemeni desert. Each of them will need ruthless determination, and immense luck to survive the next forty-eight hours.
Corrie Rankin is already a legend at MI6 when he is called back with little regard for the horrors of his recent past. Corrie is sent to take advantage of a chance to take down a high value player in the war against Al Qaeda – and, a chance for the Brits to succeed without begging help from the Americans. The sniper and his spotter who will go with Corrie are less than top team, but the best that can be found if the mission is to stay ‘deniable’.
Once the three misfits are in Yemen, they must rely on intelligence brought to them by a young British Jihadi – on the ground and close to the target – and now turned. Close to him, is an archaeologist digging in the ruins of the Queen of Sheba civilisation who will be their cut-out contact point. The mission is the brain-child of an apparently old, fat fool in a striped cricket blazer, a sweating figure of fun among the ex-pat community across the border in Muscat. His name is Jericho … not as old, fat or foolish as he appears, nor as harmless. The weapons deployed might be state-of-the-art, but the fear and violence are as primitive as human instinct.
Gerald Seymour (https://www.harpercollins.co.uk/cr-100184/gerald-seymour) was a reporter at ITN for fifteen years, where his first assignment was covering the Great Train Robbery in 1963. He later covered events in Vietnam, Borneo, Aden, the Munich Olympics, Israel and Northern Ireland. Seymour’s first novel was the acclaimed thriller Harry’s Game, set in Belfast, which became an instant bestseller and later a television series. Six of Seymour’s thrillers have now been filmed for television in the UK and US.
480 pages in Hodder paperback
First published 2017
ISBN 978-1473617780
Gerald Seymour