Review: Really rather good
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 05 31, 2012
This is a commendably concise and well-constructed thriller. It has a complicated plot which unfolds at a terrific pace and twists very interestingly in places, but the verve and clarity of the author's style ensure that it never becomes confusing or incoherent. There are many resemblances (stylistic tics, so forth) to Adam Hall's Quiller novels, to which I was introduced by someone or other some time back; and although Ratcatcher successfully avoids the modern-day incubus of homage, many of Hall's own virtues are on display here: the superbly choreographed fight scenes, the arduously imaginative methods of concealment and the useful professional tricks (the medical treatment with a ball-point pen would earn an appreciative nod from Quiller). Ratcatcher has its inevitable genre tropes - the betrayed hero, the expendable sidekick, the ex-Soviet religious fanatic - but they are used the way genre tropes ought to be used, as devices for getting the job done rather than as props for sloppy work. Ratcatcher is well worth your time.