In pursuit of a right little tosser
Nicholas Fleming
THE HEART OF DANGER by Gerald Seymour HarperCollins, £14.99, pp. 397 It would be difficult not to like Mary Braddock. She sounds a pretty good egg. She helps Save the Children and other charities. She has a brace of dogs, an Aga, and lives in a Grade II listed manor house with husband number two, a currently cooking up some deal or other with Koreans. Husband number one (the reptile!) is long gone.
Then comes tragedy: a UN team discov- ers the body of her daughter, Dorrie, in a mass grave in the former Yugoslavia. Mary Braddock engages the services of Bill Penn to investigate the circumstances of Dorrie's death. At first Penn appears to be a nerd and not up to the job. He is working for a tacky private investigation outfit above a launderette in SW19, his colleagues' princi- pal activity being the fiddling of expenses and the spinning out of their seedy cases. Penn used to be in the British secret service and was thrown out for trying to ascend the promotion ladder above the point where a bloke without a degree can go. Hence: a bit of a chip on the shoulder.
Now, here is the hook, the ingenious bit. Dorrie was in no way a sweet English rose. Far from it. In everyone's opinion including her mother's — she was a five- star, bloody-minded pain. Numerable offences to be taken into consideration: screwing local yobs, stealing mum's Visa card to buy motor bike for one of latter, full frontal strip at birthday party, pouring ketchup over local MFH at dinner party, and so on. In other words, as Penn puts it, she was 'a right little tosser'. Penn travels to Zagreb. The reader begins to warm to him. He's an obstinate sort of fellow but a pro and by skill and luck unearths the details of how Dorrie met her death. He could now write the report for Mary Braddock and return home. He wavers. And here for the only time in this splendid thriller are we able to predict with any certainty what is going to happen next. We sense that Penn will feel it his duty to cross the front line and try to make his way to the village where Dorrie was murdered — a place described by one of Penn's former colleagues in the intelli- gence service as 'a mantrap for the uniniti- ated. Area of extreme danger.' And indeed Penn does go.
It is impossible to find fault with this book, which builds relentlessly towards its climax. It has an intense feeling of authen- ticity and it's well written. Seymour expects his readers to keep their wits about them. One can be several paragraphs into a chapter and not quite sure of what's going on before enough pointers are dropped for one to get one's bearings. Even the minor characters are well drawn — the 'quiet American' researching war crimes in a Zagreb parking lot, the odious British oik turned mercenary, and so on. But what The Heart of Danger is about is excitement and here Seymour excels. This is a seat-of- the-pants, heart thumper of a thriller. One word of warning: it is not for the squeamish.
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