I have always wanted to be in an action thriller.
Such fleeting fantasies tend to find me when travelling. Every woman under the age of forty has and no doubt continues to fanaticise about staring in their own music video. For men however, these stolen moments of contemplation, these breaks from life (as I like to call them) certainly for myself, offer a far more adventurous and perhaps, dare I say it, self serving experience.
Every single man at some point in his life wishes he could be a spy. James Bond with his weekly yacht charters, the bikini clad girls sipping champagne and getting up to all sorts of sexy espionage business. Such a rich world for one to escape! However, I have never found a spy book that I enjoy. I've tried them all; the James Bond series was too hammy, Dan Brown might as well as written a movie script. I have never successfully managed to pin down a thriller that makes me go.. yes! That is until two weeks ago...
At first I thought I wouldn't enjoy it. Appearing to be cut from the same cloth as so many since those god awful fast paced novels that Dan Brown's imagination continues to regurgitate. With that relentlessness for allowing the truth to get in the way of a good story. Latent Hazard a political spy thriller with a plot that's massively reminiscent of Robert Ludlum or Alistair MacLean had me somewhat reluctant to pop on the kettle, get into my Charles Ames and Indulge.
Set in the present day, everything is pretty much as it currently has been for the past 5 years; The British economy is in jeopardy, terrorists wait in the wings like a pack of hungry wolves ready to further smash the left over pieces of this already crumbling society. The world appears like it's about collapse; it certainly had my attention.
I soon realised after the first two chapters that this book is different, it made me think. The writer Piers Venmore-Rowland an ex business school professor, effortlessly makes politics and finance as sexy as any James Bond novel, there's even a Sunseeker predator 75 mentioned on page 141. But not to ruin this book further; if you happen to be someone that wants to read Dan Brown but are educated enough to realise that most of what he writes is non-sense, then this book is indeed for you.
The latent Hazard is available in both a simplified version (for all of those that don't enjoy financial chat) and the original version from Amazon.