The Outsiders

This is a well written contemporary thriller which achieves that rare distinction of combining a tense and eventful narrative with engaging and largely credible characters. I think it deserves to become a classic, but I think few will disagree at the very least it's an excellent read. The story concerns how Winnie Monks - a middle-ranking M15 officer - plots to take revenge on the Russian ex-soldier turned fixer and criminal, who some years previously had brutally killed an M15 field agent. The agent had not only been on Winnie's team but had been lodging with her, so it's all very personal. The Russian travels in secret, his communications protected by a young computer geek, but when the geek is wrongly accused of theft by his boss, he responds by revealing the Russian's plans to hold an important business meeting in a villa near Marbella. Much of the novel follows how Winnie arranges to have the villa put under surveillance and what happens when the surveillance team unintentionally meet up with a young English couple who have been asked to caretake what Winnie had thought would be an empty house next to the villa in question. The couple become central to the story. At the same time we follow the Russian as he makes his way to Spain via West Africa and Morocco, and get to understand his back-story and that of his accomplices / bodyguards. The Spanish background is right up-to-date, with the property boom at an end, the British ex-pat community struggling to survive, and corruption endemic. The picture Seymour paints of the extensive high- and low-level criminality is frightening, and whether true or not, it forms a horribly credible backdrop to the story. Seymour is known for his downbeat endings, but I found the ending to Outsiders to be somewhat more upbeat and overall genuinely satisfying. He avoids the obvious cliché's of the genre, but still leaves us with an exciting denouement, with lives tempered and forever changed by the dreadful events that take place. My one reservation concerns the character of Winnie herself. I simply couldn't picture her, and it seemed to me that the author might have started of with a somewhat different character in mind to what he ended up with. However, this is a minor issue in what is surely a must for all lovers of the thriller genre.

Even in a "thriller", Gerald Seymour always gives you a lot to think about. How does a situation change people? Who are you, really? This was, for me, a heart thumper. Right up to the end.

I love Seymour's books because they seem so very real. This one about the Russian Mafia "retiring" in Spain yet still participating to a limited extent enforced a belief I have that the Communist regime in the USSR created monstors who are more morally corrupt than the bad guys our law enforcement people hunted down during the Depression and the Mafia types from various countries who are now in the USA. The characters occupying the Russian household and those Russians traveling to Spain, organizing a drug smuggling route, are almost as real as those staying in the neighboring house in an effort to get information that will take them down.

You know what you will get from Gerald Seymour and he produces like clockwork every year a well researched, topical thriller where the good guys have as many flaws and weaknesses as the villains and there is no guarantee that good will triumph over evil - a bit like life itself. It is amazing that an author can maintain such a level of consistency over so many years and I feel that his latest offering is as tightly plotted and attention grabbing as any of its many predecessors. The writing is crisp and confident and the characters well drawn and fleshed out. I generally have 2 or 3 books on the go at any one time and the best compliment I can pay Gerald Seymour is to say that none of the others got a look in until I had finished The Outsiders.

Well paced, authentic and engaging thrilller by one of the best writers in the business. Set largely in an area many will know from their holidays on the Costa del Sol.