Timebomb by Gerald SeymourMy review
rating: 2 of 5 stars
In the chaos of the end of the Soviet Union, a disgruntled officer at a nuclear weapons decommissioning facility steals a small tactical weapon and buries it in his garden under a sheet of lead. Fifteen years later he digs it up and arranges to sell it to a Russian Mafia boss for the sum of ... one million dollars (try not saying that in a Doctor Evil voice!). An intercepted mobile phone call from a certain town in Russia to a Russian 'businessman' in London rings alarm bells in the headquarters of the British secret service and Christopher Lawson, an old school cold war spy, takes control of an unrelated undercover operation being run by the fraud squad of Scotland Yard on the businessman. He engineers events to force the undercover policeman deeper into the confidence of the Russian gangsters to find out exactly what is being planned.
This is a bit of an odd book - for about 90% of its length it flies along at a cracking pace, with secret agents, elderly Russian soldiers, brutal gangsters and Islamic terrorists all converging on a rendezvous at the site of a former concentration camp in a Polish forest, with the nuclear weapon being the maguffin that draws them there. At the end though, it all falls apart with some highly improbable coincidences and deus ex machinas and an oddly abrupt conclusion. I get the feeling that the author really wanted to write about the true history of a mass revolt and escape by prisoners at the Sobibor camp, but for some reason he shoe horned the story into an otherwise fairly run of the mill spy thriller.
I won this book in a free draw at My Favorite Books so I was not quite as disappointed as if I'd paid cash money for it. Only recommended if you see it cheap at an airport bookshop and have a long journey to kill.
Oh, and the cover is highly misleading as well!
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