Week 46: A Hard Landing (book 47)

After a quiet couple of weeks, I've just finished A Hard Landing, by Stephen Leather, which I read as an Ebook. It's a fast-paced thriller and the first in a series of books featuring Dan "Spider" Shepherd - an ex-SAS trooper and now, undercover policeman. The action gets going from the very first page and the tension builds up leading to a big finish! We follow Shepherd on an operation that he thinks has come to an end, but finds himself in prison as a result and is asked to maintain his undercover character while starting a whole new investigation to try and find a mole who is helping a particularly unsavoury drug baron who is on remand inside the same prison. All Spider wants to do is get home to his wife and son, but cannot resist this new case. As more witnesses seem to be disappearing, so making the case against the drug baron become weaker and weaker, the pressure mounts. Can Spider maintain his cover and his sanity and find out what's really going on before the baddie goes free? If it's a thriller you are after that carries you along on the crest of an action wave, then Stephen Leather is for you. A good read, although sometimes a little confusing with huge gaps between the time some of the characters are mentioned again and you find yourself thinking ... who was that, and where do they fit into the story again? But despite this, I enjoyed it - but it's not for the faint-hearted (as you would expect with these types of characters), with a smattering of brutality thrown into the mix. It's such a shame that the rest of the books in the series are not priced as nicely as the first ... but it's a great marketing ploy, price the first one cheaply and get you hooked into the character so that you buy the next!

My star rating: FOUR.

The stats bit:
Length: 384 print pages.
Price I paid: £0.49 (Kindle).
Other formats available in: print; audio (cassette).