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A Deadly Trade (Josh Thane Thriller, Book 1)

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A Deadly Trade (Josh Thane Thriller, Book 1) by E. V. Seymour

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By E. V. Seymour

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1 review

This time there are no rules…

An unputdownable new thriller from E. V. Seymour, introducing hired assassin Josh Thane, perfect for fans of Lee Child, Mark Dawson and Alan McDermott.

Reviews

09 Jun 2020

Oundle Crime

Let’s be hypothetical and imagine...
- You are a well trained and experienced assassin for hire.
- Your target is a female British research microbiologist who may or may not have created a deadly biological weapon.
- You must find and remove a vital hard drive containing the blueprint for the weapon, which your shadowy employer wants for his own ends.
- Your intel informs you that she is at home and that she lives alone.

Then imagine:
- You walk into her house late one night and find her already dead, obviously murdered.
- Her safe is open and the hard drive gone, and then
- Her 15-year old son walks in on you and gets a good look at your face.
What do you do?

This is what happens in the first three pages of E V Seymour’s 2013 thriller: A Deadly Trade.

The protagonist in this book is Josh Thane – a man trained in the assassination trade by Mossad, experienced in his craft, shadowy, with many identities and many hits under his belt.

So, what does Josh do? What he should do is kill the boy to shut off any links to himself and then take to his heels. Instead he spares the boy’s life, flees, and then realises that if he’s to stay alive he needs some answers. What was the woman engaged in and who killed her? What’s on the hard drive, who wants it and for what purpose? Who is the man who hired Josh to terminate the woman, and why does he want the hard drive? And – most importantly – where is the hard drive now?

The answer to the first question comes easily enough from his old Mossad mentor. Someone has developed a way to commit biological genocide, a deadly virus which can be formulated to target specific ethnic groups. The woman was working on this, or maybe on a biological defence against such a weapon.

What follows is a high-octane thriller where Josh – known as Hex in his professional life – pursues all avenues at his disposal to find the missing hard drive and the answers.

The plot develops at a good pace and becomes more and more complicated. At times I felt as if I was following a corkscrew. The trail takes Josh across Europe and into the shadier sides of Britain. Along the way he’s apprehended by a rather attractive MI5 agent and falls foul of Mossad in a big way, by killing 4 of their agents during an ambush in central London (while saving the life of the MI5 woman and her partner). He also meets up with various shady characters from London’s criminal underworld and Muslim fundamentalists – people to whom this ethnic-specific weapon is of huge interest. Scarier and scarier.

When Josh eventually finds the scientist’s killer and the holder of the blueprint (one and the same person) it doesn’t come as a complete surprise. There have been clues to their identity from about halfway through the book, but cleverly the author makes us sometimes think: ‘yes, that’s the one’, and then sometimes think: ‘no, never’. I won’t give any more of the plot away.

Initially I didn’t like Josh much. He seemed cold, uncaring (apart from his sparing the boy’s life), and a cliché of an assassin in fiction. A bit like James Bond gone to the dark side and without humour. But as we go along something seems to change in him. Sparing the boy’s life brings to the surface events from his own youth, what happened to him and clues to how he ended up in the life he has. In other words, he becomes almost human and there are hints that his life as an assassin is at an end.

Some of the characters around Josh seem like clichés as well. There’s the Russian gangster; Josh’s old Mossad mentor; and his immediate contact, a man who’s obviously very afraid of their shadowy boss; plus several other gangster/villains. And there’s the beautiful MI5 agent with whom Josh falls in love.

To start with I didn’t like the book much, and in fact nearly put it down a couple of times. It is strewn with dead bodies, some dispatched by Josh, some by the various bad guys. And yet, although the story was stereotypical and clichéd, it still had enough readability to make me carry on. So, if you enjoy spy thrillers and aren’t too critical you might well like this. And I might even look for the sequel!
I give it 4-Stars.
Review by: Freyja

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