Winnie Monks has never forgotten – or forgiven – the death of a young agent on her team at the hands of a former Russian Army Major turned gangster. Now, years later, she hears the Major is travelling to a villa on the Costa del Sol and she asks permission to send in a surveillance unit.
They find an empty property near the Major’s. The Villa Paraiso. It’s perfect to spy from – and as a base for Winnie’s darker, less official, plans.
But it turns out that the property isn’t deserted. The owners have invited a young British couple to ‘house sit’ while they are away.
For Jonno and Posie, just embarking on a relationship, this is supposed to be a carefree break in the sun. But when the Secret Service team arrives in paradise, everything changes.
(P)2012 Hodder & Stoughton
They find an empty property near the Major’s. The Villa Paraiso. It’s perfect to spy from – and as a base for Winnie’s darker, less official, plans.
But it turns out that the property isn’t deserted. The owners have invited a young British couple to ‘house sit’ while they are away.
For Jonno and Posie, just embarking on a relationship, this is supposed to be a carefree break in the sun. But when the Secret Service team arrives in paradise, everything changes.
(P)2012 Hodder & Stoughton
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Reviews
Those [Seymour] sends off into dangerous territory are, in fact, his readers. With each book, we enter a dangerous universe, and are totally involved with utterly plausible characters, faced with moral choices that are rarely straightforward . . . The single most important element here is the obsessive Winnie, whose pursuit of revenge for her dead agent is the motor for all that happens. Winnie is a forceful creation, with her burning resentment against those who feel contempt for the way the rest of us live.
Once again demonstrating his ability to probe the moral murkiness of the spy trade and create an absorbingly diverse ensemble, Seymour crafts a sophisticated, reader-teasing tale.
[Seymour's] books are rich in the drama of people reacting to events and situations they never could have expected.
Picking up a novel by Gerald Seymour is like taking a deep breath of fresh air . . . his subject here is the Middle East, presented with a vividness and veracity that makes most of his rivals look footling . . . As always with Seymour, the sense of a minatory foreign landscape is acutely rendered . . . never have the badlands of Iraq been evoked with such oppressive rigour. And how many other writers would have fleshed out the bomb-maker, who would simply represent "evil" in most thrillers? Seymour allows us into the life and consciousness of this man, movingly describing his marriage to a mortally ill woman. When readers get to the nailbiting climax, involving an agonising wait for airborne rescue, they may be wondering why they should bother with any other thriller writer.
Seymour is a master of the thriller set on the murky edges of modern war . . . As ever he juggles action, context and suspense with a special-forces level of expertise. How long before he turns to Libya?
Gerald Seymour is the grand-master of the contemporary thriller and Deniable Death is his greatest work yet. Gripping, revealing and meticulously researched, this is a page-turning masterpiece that will literally leave you breathless.
After 28 novels, Seymour's empathy for those he ensnares in his moral minefields remains movingly even-handed.
gripping thriller
Mr Seymour is . . . on form . . . The tradecraft of silent watching and the discomfort, thirst and increasing claustrophobia of the hideout are brought very much to life . . . the grim landscape of the border region and the harsh lives of its inhabitants are skilfully evoked
Seymour is not one to cut corners. He does his research, thinks hard about his story and gives us richly imagined novels that bristle with authenticity.
Seymour [is] incapable of creating a two-dimensional character'
'Discerning thriller readers can safely say that the best practitioner currently working in the UK is the veteran Seymour. He is, quite simply, the most intelligent and accomplished in the current field . . . Here, we have a typically compromised Seymour anti-hero, a masterfully organised globe-spanning narrative and a mass of highly persuasive detail. The Dealer and the Dead is Seymour firing on all cylinders, and his rivals need, once again, to look to their laurels.
With Seymour, not only do you get a cracking story deftly told, but you also feel you are learning something.
In a class of his own
one of the modern masters of the craft