Book Review -- Pandora's Grave by Stephen England

Pandora's Grave by Stephen England
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a book that I read in February 2015. But I have gotten time to pen down my review only now...

Stephen England's debut novel Pandora's Grave is a speedy read. The action in the book pretty realistic and the suspense keeps the reader guessing to an extent. If you keep in mind the concept of expecting the unexpected then the suspense in this book is guessable but if you are newbie to the thriller genre the book is bound to surprise you.

I will not go much into the plot premise, that can be found from the book blurb anyways. Harry Nichols is a team man, he lives and breathes and trusts his team, he knows that he has been in some tough spots with his team but with them backing each other to the hilt they have always come up on tops. He trusts his team implicitly. But things are starting to go wrong with the planned mission, there are slip ups and there are mishaps, nothing very serious but they are setting back the tempo of the mission and are causing problems that need to be dealt with.

But the problem is that there is a leak in the team. Somebody is leaking information and Nichols trusts his team, he knows it cannot be one of his people, it has to be someone new who has come into the team. But the stakes are high and failure is not an option. The final show down is in Jerusalem. A place where three major religions have a huge stake and any slip up here can cause a religious war of disastrous consequences.

Major players like Israel, Iran are involved in this and the potential to offend the sensibilities is tremendous. It is a tripwire of humongous proportions and England comes up in spades in managing the taunt storyline while maintaining the suspense for as long as possible without letting up on the action.

This is the first that I have seen on Harvey Nichols and based on what I have seen I would like to see more and happily for me there is more coming up in the form of other novels in the series. A great start and really worth the 4 stars for the high octane action… Action Thrillers have a new star and Stephen England is thy name.


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