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SEVERED
by Simon Kernick
Corgi, January 2008
352 pages
$6.99
ISBN: 0552153133


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

If you like high-octane thrillers with a definite testosterone overload, then Simon Kernick's SEVERED is one for you.

Tyler's an ex-army guy now running a car dealership in London. Then he wakes up one morning with the dead body of his girlfriend beside him. A quick look at a DVD in the nearby machine seemingly confirms that he's killed her.

And then there's this phonecall telling him to deliver a briefcase to an address in east London, and not to leave that house without collecting another briefcase in return.

It then turns into 24 hours of bloodshed and gore by the barrel-load as Tyler (no, no idea whether it's his first name or surname and, like Jack Bauer, he doesn't seem to go to the loo!), careers round London at speed, collecting help from some unlikely sources, as he tries to find out who set him up.

Kernick is rapidly cornering the market in producing British noir thrillers that are faintly redolent of what Harlan Coben and Joseph Finder are doing the other side of the pond. But aside from the Mr Ordinary having to get himself out of a jam, Kernick lacks Coben's lightness of touch. SEVERED is unremittingly grim. And there's not much in the way of characterisation as the action thunders past, leaving flattened silhouettes in its wake. The female characters come across as either victims, schemers or temptresses.

What Kernick does do well, though, is to create some switchback plotting where you're never sure who can be trusted. And he's created a fast-moving page-turner that will keep you out of mischief for an afternoon and evening. SEVERED relies on a fairly stock plot in many ways, but it's tightly plotted, very competently written, and just when you think you've guessed who's set Tyler up, another twist takes the book up and running again.

Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, December 2007

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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