Jack’s Back

Aye, but has he ever really been away? The only Irish crime writer who can claim a more prodigious output than Ken Bruen, Jack Higgins must have six arms and a small tribe of researcher elves locked away in his basement. The Killing Ground, due on October 1, is the sixquillionth novel of his alarmingly large canon of work, and the blurb elves have been squeaking thusly:

For intelligence operative Sean Dillon, it is a routine passport check. But the events it will lead to will be as bloody as any he has ever known. The man he stops at Heathrow airport is Caspar Rashid, born and bred in England, but with family ties to a Bedouin tribe fiercely wedded to the old ways, as Rashid has just found out to his pain. His thirteen-year-old daughter, Sara, has been kidnapped by Rashid’s own father and taken to Iraq to be married to a man known as the Hammer of God, one of the Middle East’s most feared terrorists. Dillon has had his own run-ins with that tribe, and when the distraught man begs him for help, he sees a chance to settle some old scores – but he has no idea of the terrible chain of events he is about to unleash, nor of the implacable enemies he is about to gain. Before his journey is done, many men will die – and Dillon may be one of them.

The indestructible Dillon dead? Pshaw, blurb elves, for shame – lure us not with your patently false elf-promises. You won’t be warned again …