Having been assigned, he works as assiduously as ever, and the fact that he has a wholly new sphere of external contacts to deal with, does not make him try to be any more gracious or amenable than he has been in the past. This is the third book in this excellent series featuring the totally believable and ever so endearing Jonas Merrick. My thanks to the Author publisher's and NetGalley for providing me with a Kindle version of this book to read and honestly review. The character of Jonas Merrick seems to have developed in a rather unpleasant way that I found irritating to such an extent that it distracted from the storyline rather than added to it.

He is something of an anti-hero, who cares little for his perceived persona but a great deal for the team he directs into danger. In Jonas Merrick, Seymour has created a fascinating, annoying and infuriating character everyone who has ever worked in a large organisation can relate to - the apparently irrelevant jobsworth who quietly and meticulously weaves his web and achieves results that surprise all of those who have dismissed him as a nobody. Jonas Merrick in his Smiley-esque role is a slow moving puller of strings but the book travels at a fast pace, not least because of the episodic structure of the writing, which means keeping the reader's wits alert as each scene changes. I think that he could have trimmed a little from it as it seemed to take an eternity to get to the end point and by that time I was not invested enough in any of the characters to really care very much. But while Jonas's colleagues regard him as scratchy, fastidious, old, he is also ruthless, cunning and brutally pragmatic.However he again retains his deep engagement and concern with those agents undercover at the front line. Another outstanding and hugely satisfying instalment in the Jonas Merrick series from Gerald Seymour. I did wonder that if this manuscript had come from someone without this reputation, would Hodder and Stoughton have been so keen to publish? His first book, Harry's Game, was published in 1975, and Seymour then became a full-time novelist, living in the West Country. My favourite character was the "hero" Jonas Merrick, a beautifully understated "conductor", masterminding events from his nondescript backroom lair.

I found the first 100 pp fairly slow going but the pace picked up very quickly after that and the last quarter or so of this novel is as tense and exciting as any of Seymour’s previous works. Every Seymour novel is like a runaway train heading down a sloping track, steadily gathering pace until eventually it crashes, with inevitable consequences for the characters, good and bad, that he has introduced us to. He always sets out good plots but his writing style is starting to irritate with his insistence on using three or four similes when one will do and how he painfully tries to avoid clichés. I loved the fact that he seemed so ordinary but was so instrumental to national and international security. He soon finds himself at the centre of a network of informants, undercover operatives and contacts from a collection of police and intelligence services around the globe.In this novel, Merrick’s covert agent knows that, if he is successful in his mission, the son of someone he has become very close to will be murdered horribly by Columbian drug lords. MI5 (via Merrick) has a deeply implanted agent in that area, one with an almost 3 year undercover engagement there, someone who has managed to become well infiltrated into the ruling drug running family of the region. Contrary to what we might infer from watching Line of Duty, this area of work is considered a bit oif a backwater by everyone in the intelligence community.

Out of the Jonas Merrick novels, this person thought that 'The Foot Soldiers' was the best one so far. As in earlier novels, Merrick acts as a lone wolf and manages to antagonise senior officers in parts of the UK’s law enforcement agencies outside MI5.The amazingly boring gray civil servant Jonas Merrick turns out in an unbelievable fashion to be the real James Bond. In the 3rd book in the series he is tasked in regards to an OCG (organised crime group) a sleepy backwater of SIS, out of sight and out of mind scenario.

I understand that this is the third book in a series - although I haven't read the earlier novels, I felt that this book worked just fine as a standalone. London: Jonas Merrick, grey and quiet, alone in a small office, seems an unlikely character to be tasked with bringing down an international drug network.This represents the third outing for Jonas Merrick, MI5’s querulous counter-intelligence data analyst. I think I've read all of Gerald Seymour's books but find this and the other Jonas Merrick books tough going. After thirty odd novels with different protagonists, it's perverse to have such a dull central figure for our first regular character. Jonas is unashamadely boring and prickly, an elderly desk warrior who gets his kicks from visiting historical sites in his caravan. A very wordy book and till you get into it, quite confusing with the long chapters and chopping and changing of where the action is taking place.