Review: The Brits corner on Espionage Thrillers: Front and center JJ Ward
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 11 29, 2013
Think through the suspense espionage thrillers that remain like phantoms in the brain and likely they will have been conceived by a British Isles author. Stepping as far back as the Sherlock Holmes style as presented by Scottish author and physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and including the imagination of Ian Fleming’s James Bond, we now add another master of the medium in J.J. Ward. Ward writes romantic fiction, espionage thrillers, philosophy and poetry. According to a brief bio, ‘he believes that commercial genres have warped people’s thinking about fiction generally. “I think they exist so readers can be easily manipulated and milked, and they also - in some of their forms - perpetuate sexism. Any good story has elements of most, if not all, genres.” He hopes men & women will read, and enjoy, what he has written in equal numbers. He lives in Sussex and is a secondary school teacher by profession, and runs the school Amnesty International club.’ And as this prolific writer has stated, ‘I want to make romance attractive to men, and guns-‘n-muscles attractive to women. And get us all talking to each other again. About books … and life. ‘A too long introduction perhaps, but when reviewing spy novels it is better to let the reader know whether or not the suspense is warranted and in the case of TALES OF THE Mi7: THE GIRL FROM KANDAHAR it is. For those who may have forgotten, MI7, the British Military Intelligence Section 7 (now defunct), was a department of the British Directorate of Military Intelligence. Part of the War Office, MI7 was set up to work in the fields of propaganda and censorship. Using this platform the story involves a British secret servicewoman in Afghanistan who is caught in a drone attack and suffers memory loss. A series of tragic and arbitrary misadventures then turns her into a suicide bomber for al-Qaeda. This is a spy novel that confronts the terror in the War on Terror head-on. It is sympathetic to Islam, optimistic about long-term East-West relations and deeply unsympathetic to warmongers everywhere. It is also a love story – a very important inclusion in light of JJ Ward’s feelings as stated above. He has polished his style well and knows when and how to turn up the heat, whether that source be linked to suspense or to passion! Grady Harp, November 13