Book Description:
All traces of self esteem have been brutally stripped from Malachy Kitchen, an Intelligence officer posted to Iraq. He is accused of cowardice while on patrol with an infantry platoon ambushed by insurgents. Word spreads that he ran under hostile fire. In the military family there is no worse crime. Humiliated and broken, kicked out of the army, Malachy sinks into despair. He becomes an isolated recluse in a drug infested London estate. But the mugging of an elderly widow by addicts lights a flame that draws him to fight to regain his lost pride. His target is the network of narcotics traders. Pushers, dealers, suppliers are that network, and at their head is Ricky Capel, a crime baron importing heroin into the UK. Untouchable up to now, Capel will have to confront an enemy more driven than any of the policemen he has so far successfully outwitted. Capel is fighting a war on only one front, but when his Albanian associates demand that he uses his drug route to ferry an Islamic fanatic to Britain, suddenly he is vulnerable from other directions. From the author who 'isn't just abreast of the headlines, but ahead of them' (The Washington Post Book World), and who is truly 'one of the unsung heroes of the political thriller' (Chicago Tribune), this is a novel at once international and personal and altogether riveting.
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