In At The Kill (Jonas Merrick series)

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Also, if the characters were suppose to be bad, then where was the terrible violence that crime families would inflict. If this was a character trait, then it would be OK, but all of his characters speak the same way which is implausible.

Sidelined by his security service bosses to work on organised crime, he tracks a cocaine-packed submersible and the crime families betting their empires and vanity on its cargo.

I think that he could have trimmed a little from it as it seemed to take an eternity to get to the end point and by that time I was not invested enough in any of the characters to really care very much. He always sets out good plots but his writing style is starting to irritate with his insistence on using three or four similes when one will do and how he painfully tries to avoid clichés.

But while Jonas’s colleagues regard him as scratchy, fastidious, old, he is also ruthless, cunning and brutally pragmatic.

The plotline of this latest novel from Gerald Seymour is excellent, multi-national criminals involved in drugs smuggling become the focus of multi-agency efforts to prevent them from succeeding under the direction of Jonas Merrick from his desk in Whitehall. With his trademark, slow-burn story - ultimately slight in nature - and a largish cast of well-drawn characters, expertly executed. He previously featured in The Crocodile Hunter (in which he dodged imminent retirement by singlehandedly apprehended a would be suicide bomber) and The Foot Soldiers (in which he was loaned to sister service MI6 to help investigate an apparent leak). After thirty odd novels with different protagonists, it's perverse to have such a dull central figure for our first regular character. A very wordy book and till you get into it, quite confusing with the long chapters and chopping and changing of where the action is taking place.