Review: Going Dark

Going Dark by Neil Lancaster
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Three and a half stars.

Tom Novak is a former Royal Marine, and member of the elite Special Reconnaissance Regiment turned police officer. Originally from Bosnia, he and his mother fled the country when he was a child after his father's death in the Yugoslav wars. After his mother's death he was brought up by a foster family in the Cairngorns of Scotland. Tom is finding piloting a desk unfulfilling so when he gets approached to go undercover to infiltrate a gang of Bosnian Serb people smugglers he is delighted. His role is to collect evidence to convict the people smugglers themselves, the Branko family, who bring girls over from Sarajevo promising them good jobs in the UK then force them into working in their brothels and the corrupt solicitor Michael Adebayo who gives them fake Slovenian passports and then forces them to marry men who want to stay in the EU (this is pre-Brexit) to falsely obtain visas.

Things are going well until he is compelled to break cover to prevent the solicitor from raping a young woman, luckily he gets it all on camera but mysteriously both his written report and the camera footage disappear in police hands, when the girl is too scared to testify it looks like the case is dead in the water. Tom had saved another copy of the footage to his phone, but there is obviously at least one person in the police who is in the pay of Adebayo and/or the Brankos and he doesn't know who to trust on the taskforce. On the run with a CIA freelancer supplied by an old friend Tom must uncover the traitors before they succeed in having him killed.

I don't normally like the Jack Reacher type of character or the SAS style hero, all stunted emotionally and skilled in every known way to kill a person. But, I do like Neil Lancaster's police novels and this was available as part of my Prime Reading (and also now available on Kindle Unlimited) so I thought I'd give it a try. I really enjoyed it, obviously there were a few cliches/lucky coincidences such as the fact that Tom had saved the life of a man who had since gone on to be a senior person in the CIA with the ability to furnish Tom with guns and surveillance equipment, a freelance operative, and a plane at short notice. My only negative was that I thought the identity of the traitor was too obvious.

I have already downloaded the second book in the series - let's see whether Tom is more than a one-trick pony.

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