In At The Kill (Jonas Merrick series)

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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. 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. The third in the Jonas Merrick series, and with Merck there now seems insufficient character left to be developed. I wonder how far Gerald Seymour can extend this series before the personality of Merrick becomes so odious to the reader that they can’t take any more. It is never an easy read, as Seymour builds the fear and worry you feel for the characters as the climax approaches, but once you are a single chapter into a Seymour novel I would defy anyone to put it down and leave the rest unread.

This is the third book in this excellent series featuring the totally believable and ever so endearing Jonas Merrick. I found the first 100 pp fairly slow going but the pace picked up very quickly after that and the last quarter or so of this novel is as tense and exciting as any of Seymour’s previous works. so we can see Jonas adapting to new - and difficult - circumstances as a widower, whilst continuing his Eternal Flame duties.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. 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. However he again retains his deep engagement and concern with those agents undercover at the front line. His first book, Harry's Game, was published in 1975, and Seymour then became a full-time novelist, living in the West Country.

I have followed Seymour, and read all his books, since Harry's Game in the 1970's and like a fine wine he seems to get better and better as the years pass. In this novel, however, he has found himself moved from handling potential security threats to dealing with organised crime groups and one Liverpool-based one in particular. Jonas Merrick works in counter surveillance helping to keep the country safe and break any criminal enterprises.But, in this installment, things take a time to get going and then after you, the reader, have all the players understood, it takes a bit more time to get going and then, finally you get to the climax of the story.

My thanks to the Author publisher's and NetGalley for providing me with a Kindle version of this book to read and honestly review. My favourite character was the "hero" Jonas Merrick, a beautifully understated "conductor", masterminding events from his nondescript backroom lair. In Jonas Merrick, Seymour has created a fascinating, annoying and infuriating character everyone who has ever worked in a large organisation can relate to - the apparently irrelevant jobsworth who quietly and meticulously weaves his web and achieves results that surprise all of those who have dismissed him as a nobody. MI5 (via Merrick) has a deeply implanted agent in that area, one with an almost 3 year undercover engagement there, someone who has managed to become well infiltrated into the ruling drug running family of the region. I understand that this is the third book in a series - although I haven't read the earlier novels, I felt that this book worked just fine as a standalone.

Still as querulous and obdurate as ever, he has been assigned to help the fight against OCG (organised crime groups). 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). This represents the third outing for Jonas Merrick, MI5’s querulous counter-intelligence data analyst. After thirty odd novels with different protagonists, it's perverse to have such a dull central figure for our first regular character. The character of Jonas Merrick seems to have developed in a rather unpleasant way that I found irritating to such an extent that it distracted from the storyline rather than added to it.