I don’t normally like a long series of books featuring the same detective or protagonist, but this author was recommended to me by a couple of friends in Oundle Crime who love the ‘Spider’ Shepherd thrillers, so I decided to give one a try. So far Stephen Leather has written twenty-two books about Dan ‘Spider’ Shepherd and Clean Kill, which was published in 2023 is Book 20. And you know what? I was quite pleasantly surprised by it!
This is very definitely an action thriller and the story is very immediate and full-on. The first half of the novel consists of three stories, which come together into one.
First, we meet Dan (Spider) Shepherd, an MI5 agent who is working undercover with two colleagues in a large Cat. B prison in Bradford. A group of Bradford Muslims have come to the notice of the security services. It is suspected that the men are planning an atrocity and the plotters seem to be concentrated in and around the prison. Dan is undercover as a cash-strapped prison officer with a gambling habit, someone who is therefore easily blackmailable.
Next, we meet Dan’s son, Liam, a young helicopter pilot with the RAF, serving in the West African country of Mali as support for the UN peacekeepers there. One day, on a fairly routine mission to help a stranded UN convoy, Liam and three colleagues find their Chinook helicopter shot to pieces around them. One of their crew is killed, the other three taken hostage by local Islamists. These people get their funds from kidnapping for ransom, and to them this is just routine. The problem for Liam and his two mates is that the British Government do not negotiate with terrorists, so the prospects don’t look good.
The third story-strand is what happens when news of the kidnapping becomes known. A group of SAS soldiers are pulled together to go to Mali to rescue the young men, and what follows is pretty exciting derring-do under the hot African sun. In the planning stages, the rescue had looked quite straightforward, but the situation on the ground is complicated by the presence of Wagner Group mercenaries in the area. (Incidentally these Russian mercenaries are very real, with a reputation for violence every bit as bad and worse than described in this book.) It’s exciting stuff, and against the odds the mission succeeds.
Once everyone is back in the UK the different story strands come together and things move up a gear. Dan is back in Bradford, working at the prison, when a riot kicks-off. Suddenly he’s caught in the middle of a prison siege, orchestrated by prisoners calling themselves ‘Islamic State of Britain’ who are threatening executions live on TV. More derring-do is required!
My verdict
I found this book relentlessly exciting, in a couple of places unpleasantly so. And, for me, there was too much technical detail about aircraft, weapons and military paraphernalia in the Mali section that didn’t add much to the story. (Sometimes it felt as if anything that could have an acronym had one!)
Nonetheless the book was very readable, and I particularly enjoyed the early part, where Dan is working undercover, playing a timid and cowed prison officer. Stephen Leather’s descriptions of the powerplay and machinations of the prisoners were fascinating, if rather ominous.
I surprised myself by quite liking this book. The writing is nothing to write home about but it gets the job done. There isn’t much in the way of descriptive prose, and the various characters are either very good, or very, very bad, with nothing in-between. But it would be unfair to focus just on that, because this kind of storytelling is just what’s needed in an action thriller like this. And possibly, if I read more books in this series, I’d get to know more about Dan Shepherd’s backstory and see nuance more easily.
Clean Kill wasn’t a book I will remember for long, but while I was reading it I never felt as if I was wasting my time. As I say, it surprised me, and I give it 3 Stars.
Review by: Freyja
At Oundle Crime, 3 Stars = Not good or bad, but an average story and characters. You enjoyed reading it, but might not remember it after a month.
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