Once again, in The Walking Dead, Gerald Seymour delivers a topical thriller to make you feel robbed when you have to put the book down to attend to normal life. This time, the story concerns an attempt to conduct an Iraqui style suicide bombing in an English town centre. To achieve this, it is necessary to bring in an Arabic terrorist leader (The Scorpion) and a bomb-maker (The Engineer) from the battle zones of Iraq, to work with an English cell to set up this audacious act.
The cast of characters is vast including an embittered special protection officer who’s perspective on terrorist is changed by reading his great uncle’s diaries from the Spanish civil war, a near-retirement security officer who has one last chance to deliver a real success, retired interrogation officers who are brought back to extract the truth from a cell-defector, and many others, all equally memorable, and also typically Seymour (fans will know what I mean).
There is so much that is good about this book it is hard to know where to start. Seymour ably brings out the tensions in the bombers cell between the battle-hardened “professional†terrorists and the British Asian recruits. The sub-theme of the special protection officer reading his great-uncle’s diaries is very well-handled and shows the complex moral questions around going to join foreign wars. Not content with telling the tale of the bombing plot, Seymour also cleverly weaves in a story about a criminal trial of two East-end gangsters and a very human tale of one of the jurors.
This book is meaty and lengthy but as usual is broken up into many short sections so we can see how the story develops among the cast of characters and see the complex build-up to the final climax. Seymour is a highly professional writer and The Walking Dead will not disappoint Seymour’s many fans who will again say, “nobody does it better”. When they finish this one, they will once again wait for the next with keen anticipation.
I can’t resist correcting one error in the book at page 332. It was not Dietrich Bonhoeffer who said “when they took the trade unionists I did not protest because I was not a trade-unionist . . . “, but Pastor Martin Niemoller.
