This one looked right up my street. Fantastic cover. Arctic setting. An out break of a virus. Heck we even have a gruesome death in the opening pages. Here we go I thought.

Not so unfortunately. Despite being about a potential outbreak of a deadly virus, not a lot actually happens. There are lots of meetings, lots of acronyms that have to be explained (which became extremely tedious), an agent that must be the most incompetent agent that ever existed, making one stupid decision after another and a story that never fulfilled its opening set up and promise.

The dialogue is extremely cheesy at times, there’s a romantic side story shoe horned in that feels extremely clumsy and the whole thing was just extremely underwhelming.

A shame. It has some good ideas but the direction chosen by the author and the poor writing overall made this a no no for me unfortunately.

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC

My first Frank Gardner! I did seem to read it all in his voice I'm afraid but as most of it was pretty serious stuff it kind of worked. I need to read the rest of the Luke Carlton books but I liked the fact that he's portrayed as an M16 agent with flaws and doubts unlike many main characters in the spy genre. Bizarrely I'm still enjoying epidemic scenarios in fiction despite lockdown. A strong four stars and my oh my that ending!!