Wednesday, November 27, 2024

Review: What Money Can’t Buy (Book 1 in the Harry Miller Trilogy) by Joe Halliday


 

Genre: Thriller

Description:

Harry Miller, ex-special forces, is hunted down in Slovenia by powerful forces working outside the law to bring to heel other powerful forces working outside the law. Thereafter we whizz through London and immediately head for Thailand, where most of the action takes place; mainly in Bangkok.

One fears such shadowy forces may well exist, world-wide. And not just in fiction. Fortunately they are not usually bothered with little fish. However, in our world of uber-big business and mega-smuggling operations, the scenario is oh-so believable. Little fish do sometimes get sucked into the orbit of these behemoths. And not all escape alive.

Author:

Joe Halliday has a degree from Exeter University in Britain and a Masters in Creative Writing from the same institution. Thereafter he spent a couple of years in Marketing, before becoming a freelance writer.

He has ghost-written a number of acclaimed works of fiction. He also writes non-fiction. And is now writing under his own name.

He reads obsessively in a wide range of genres.

He splits his time between the UK and Spain.

Appraisal:

What are soldiers good for when they’ve been chewed up in a conflict zone and retired with PTSD? They become assassins, or criminals, or work in security. Or perhaps all three. And although they may swear off the killing, some of them really miss it. After all, if you’ve sacrificed everything you ever loved for the armed forces, what else is going to get your pulse racing?

There is not a lot of humour in this book. But there is a LOT of action, beautifully put on the page, which will have you turning said pages over like a mad thing. There is never a dull moment. This deserves to be a movie. Or a mini-series.

The action flits and sips. It begins, for instance with ‘Them’ coming for a journalist (not in a good way). The reason for this is withheld for so long that I had quite forgotten about her when that piece of the plot was slotted (neatly) into place. This is not the only change of tack. You need to go with the flow but do try to remember what happened when the story goes off piste – it will become important. To paraphrase Chekhov, all of the guns over various mantlepieces get fired at some point.

There are two more books (as you can see above this is the first in a trilogy) all of which are now available for your nail-biting pleasure.

Buy now from:            Amazon US        Amazon UK

Format/Typo Issues:

No significant issues.

Rating: **** Four Stars

Reviewed by: Judi Moore

Approximate word count: 95-100,000 words

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