So Horrible a Place by
Margaret Duffy
hbk out January 05
Published by Allison Busby
at £18.99
This is the ninth in a series of rather unlikely stories about senior soldier
Patrick Gillard and his crime-writer wife Ingrid Langley.
In this tale, Patrick is now plain 'Mister' instead of Colonel, as he has
resigned his Camberley Staff College job. Previously, he was in Special
Operations and together with his wife, worked for MI5, until the
succession of close encounters with death decided them to stay home
with the four kids.
To allay his boredom and to get him out of his wife's hair, he takes a
job( which again seems to include the wife) as technical adviser in guns
and dirty tricks to a production unit which is making a big-budget film
based on a controversial book about an undercover Army operation in
Ulster which went fatally pear-shaped. The film now seems to overtake
Ulster in fatalities, as first the star's understudy is shot dead in the car
park, then it turns out that the author of the book was murdered, followed
by the scriptwriter.
Ingrid naturally gets the wind-up over her husband's safety, especially
after the hospital has to pick bits of brick from his neck after another shot
is a near-miss.
The rest of the book is in the same vein until the goodies triumph in the
end. Good, up-beat writing of a kind of cheerful James Bond-ish yarn of
an invincible couple who come back time and time again to escape bullets
and bombs. Plenty of suspension of disbelief required, but a good read.
(
Bernard Knight
ex Home Office Pathologist and author of the highly acclaimed Crowner John series)
So Horrible a Place by
Margaret Duffy
