From Publishers Weekly
There's not much to like about this thin tale from an Irish novelist and playwright. Davison writes in short, flat sentences ("She did not stay on the motorway long. It was dangerous for her. She might have to stop to hit her brother-in-law again with the jack handle.") that quickly overwhelm any initial, quirky appeal. As told by Harry Fielding, a seedy freelance criminal who works as an "understrapper" (sort of a villain of all trades) for a sleek British intelligence officer known as Hamilton, the narrative reads like an unfunny parody of Len Deighton's early Palmer books, but without Deighton's wit or talent. Fielding lives in a wretched London flat, eating foil containers of airline food which he buys by the batch, contents unknown. Although he tells us that his job description doesn't include kidnapping or killing, he's soon up to his neck in dead bodies--helping a neighbor dispose of an abusive relative, aiding Hamilton in cleaning up after a nasty murder, savaging a journalist who gets in the way. Occasionally vivid settings--a restaurant in London's Chinatown or a ramshackle Dublin hotel--hold promise of significance, but Davison's ungraceful prose doesn't deliver on them.
Copyright 1998 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
From Booklist
Forget the knee-jerk comparisons to le Carre; this oddly compelling blue-collar spy novel, the debut effort from the talented Davison, has the feel of George Higgins'
Friends of Eddie Coyle--gritty, low-life pathos, tightly written and utterly unromantic. Harry Fielding is an "understrapper," a freelancer for MI5, the British equivalent of the FBI. He lives an anonymous, dreary life, spying on government types, breaking and entering, doing the odd wiretap--no "wet work" and nothing particularly important. That all changes when Harry happens to witness two murders, one involving a cabinet minister and requiring an elaborate cover-up. Gradually, Harry finds himself troubled by the corruption around him and begins to look for a way out of the morass. Tone is everything here; Harry moves as if in a self-induced trance, somewhere between Camus' Mersault and Travis Bickle in
Taxi Driver. Harry's London is a dreary, soul-stultifying place, and his attempt to escape seems to offer only another kind of defeat. A muted, minimalist morality tale without a moral.
Bill OttCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
