Well written thriller full of pace and action, with some romance, and some predictable moves coming ‘out of the blue’. The plan of the novel is quite simple: we keep following Paul Tallis, who has had a troublesome youth, has a brother who is his opposite (a bend copper and a racist), and has a bad name due to an incident where he shot a suspected terrorist, who turned out innocent. O yeah, he also had an affair with his brother’s wife, who was abused by her husband and works at forensics (always convenient). Anyway, everything falls in place in this thriller (no contradictions or good guys turning out bad – such a pity!), which is probably why it got such low scores on library.com. The interesting thing is that MI5 actually keeps a tap on the whole story, though it only starts to act for real towards the end. Seymour could have used that as a parallel plot (which is so popular these days that you’d almost expect it; all these editors and creative writing course mentors tell you to do the same thing).

Well what is it all about? It is about a UKIP type, racist, Britain for the British kind of movement with its own Nigel Farage (upper-class fat cat that claims to fight for the man in the street) and a dodgy illegal arm of cells that takes care of the street fights. MI5 wants to get to the bottom of the links between the illegal cells and its link to a ‘respectable’ right wing party. And that’s where a female lesbian operative comes in who blackmails Tallis into catching four foreigners on the loose (recently released from justified prison sentences and wrongly put out on the street instead of being deported). Tallis traces one cruel abusive character after another, allowing the writer to describe a dodgy underworld consisting of sadistic male women traffickers, female child traffickers amongst immigrant seasonal labourers, and a case involving human trafficking of refugees (perhaps ‘Traffic’ would have been a better title?) . Things go ‘wrong’, leaving a trail of (unintended) killings and incriminating evidence for our hero. The last case (‘exile’) involves a wrongly convicted gentle soul from Iraq – the good guy! And then the story takes a twist, where our hero finally starts to investigate who his commissioners are. Well for the rest, read it yourself. ( )

As a thriller, this was rather dull. Not badly written but just dull. ( )

Trust No One used to be a favourite mantra in a previous life, so it gave me a bit of a smile to see that as the heading on the back cover of this book when it arrived.

This was one of those books that a few trusted reading compatriots had been discussing, so I thought I would buy a copy and see what I thought. This note is therefore a little less of a formal review and a little more of a memory jog for me, as I understand there is a subsequent book in the series (could be more by now I've not checked).

As the blurb says, Paul Tallis, in his role as an intelligence officer, shoots dead a suspected terrorist in an opening scene that is very reminiscent of the shooting of a suspect in the London Underground a while ago. In THE LAST EXILE, Tallis is suspended, and his career is dead, until a year later he is approached by a shadowy figure working for MI5.

This was one of those books that did a lot of setting up in the early part and it was a bit of a chore to stick with it until about one third in and things start to ramp up. Well worth sticking past the initial grind, this turned out to be a reasonably good thriller, with a nicely complex and flawed central character. ( )