Firefight by Chris Ryan

Just suppose you’re out shopping one day with your wife and daughter looking for Christmas presents. You tell you them to go on ahead so you can sneak back and buy your daughter the present she desperately wants for Christmas. In the space of 2 minutes your life is changed forever. Your wife and daughter have been killed by a bomb that has ripped through the department store. Fast forward 2 years, and Will Jackson is no longer in the SAS. He is living in a grungy Council Flat near the cemetery where his family is buried. The pain of losing his family has turned him into a hard drinking recluse.
One day he is out walking when he is “kidnapped” and taken to London, where he is made an offer he can’t refuse. The powers that be want him back on the job. There has been intelligence that in the next 3 weeks a terrorist bomb will rip through the heart of London. MI5 believe that Will might be the only person who can help them track down the terrorist and also help them find out who the mole is in the intelligence world who is feeding information to the enemy. Wanting to turn his back on this world forever, he refuses to have any part of the operation. MI5 then plays their trump card – the terrorist they are after is the one responsible for killing Will’s wife and child. From that moment on Will becomes a man on a very dangerous mission that he is hell bent on seeing through to the end, damn the consequences.
This novel gives the reader a no-hold barred behind the scenes look at terrorism, the intelligence community and the ways wars are fought and not always won. Throughout the story you also get a background history lesson into how the war on terror got started, which not only helps you understand the story better, but also helps you understand the current world political situation.
Frighteningly real in parts and very explicit in the description of how information is obtained and whether or not the end justifies the means. I think this is Chris Ryan’s best book to date. He is writing about the world he used to inhabit and he does so with such graphic detail that you wonder if this is just fiction or something he really experienced when he was in the SAS. I read this book in one afternoon because it pulled me in so hard I just couldn’t put it down.
Chris