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Detective Michael Freeman is assigned to investigate the horrifying murder of a young woman whose body is found in a Washington park near the home of a prominent Senator.
The only word to describe award-winning writer Simon Conway's latest and best book so far is chilling. He's always dark enough, but this genre-bending story of murder, personal and international political power plays and military-inspired cutting edge bio-engineering is positively grim and raises moral questions that remain long after you have turned the last page.
Such questions remain because Conway's fully realized world where the superpowers compete to produce the most unimaginably obscene super soldier is all too plausible. Hitler, with his Aryan supremacy theories, began it. Who knows what happened in the former Soviet empire? We only know that there were bio-engineering experiments. Have the emerging Chinese or the Americans launched and continued with their own programmes? In the light of recent published events in the field, almost anything is possible and Conway plays on this to create a nightmare scenario.
He blends that threat cleverly with a police procedural and political thriller which immerses the reader in a story of murder, betrayal and conspiracy that stretches from Washington to the remote mountains of Georgia and the Caribbean. His characters are both engaging and convincing, the plot complex and the whole thing is brought to life by the former soldier and mine clearance expert's own knowledge of both the military and insider world of Washington politics through his wife Sarah, a former Channel Four correspondent in America's capital.
Former special forces soldier Michael Freeman is now a DC homicide detective. When he is assigned to the indescribably brutal killing of a young woman close to the home of a prominent right wing US senator he knows he is on politically dangerous ground. The body has been found by a Scottish girl, a former member of the Metropolitan police diplomatic protection group. But why is she out jogging in the snow in a lonely park at midnight? And why does she immediately take a job offer to bodyguard the daughter of the Russian director of a secretive bio-research facility funded by the Department of Defence? Gradually both Freeman and Harriet Armstrong are drawn into a world secrets and betrayals more shocking than either could imagine.
After a slow – in fact near glacial – start, the pace picks up as the body count mounts. The deaths are brutal, many of the sex scenes bordering on the totally obscene as this engrossing story powers towards a bloody climax. This is never a comfortable read and probably only for those with a strong stomach, but if you can stand it, this is a truly clever and thought provoking piece which can only enhance Conway's already impressive reputation as a writer who can prove that Black is truly Black!
§John Cleal is a former soldier and journalist with an interest in medieval history. He divides his time between France and England.
Reviewed by John Cleal, April 2013
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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