John Tyler is dead. Which is awfully convenient for someone who wants to take revenge on the people who killed his brother. But it seems that some people know what he’s up to, and when his final act of vengeance turns out to be a trap, Tyler finds himself with no choice but to do one final job for the CIA.

For someone like Tyler, it should be a straightforward job – go to an isolated former hotel on an island in Siberia, get information from a Russian scientist about a double agent and get out again. But things are never straightforward for Tyler. The hotel is haunted by its past – KGB experiments into psychic phenomena such as spontaneous human combustion for example – and by the time Tyler arrives, at least one man is already dead, burned to death.

With enemies old and new surrounding him and a killer who can walk through walls, this could indeed be Tyler’s final job.

Sorry for the blog being quiet – been busy with school exam results and reading some pretty crappy books – so I thought I’d better get down to a few upcoming new releases in case school started getting in the way as term kicks off. And what better way to start than with reading the book equivalent of a rollercoaster…

To recap, this is the third of a trilogy which started with Anthrax Island and continued into Black Run. Anthrax Island is a wonderful book – my 2021 Book Of The Year, in fact, and that’s from a year when The Appeal came out! It’s the love-child of Alistair Maclean and John Dickson Carr and definitely needs reading, especially if you want to read this one as well, as there are necessary spoilers for the earlier book, as some plot threads continue here. Black Run was just as exciting but dialled back on the locked room aspect – there is one, but it’s a bit of an old chestnut – in some ways, the room is a little too locked…

So, on to the third book, and for those interested, yes, there is a locked room, as a murder occurs when Tyler is sealed inside a nuclear bunker with three other people. It’s not treated as such, really, because Tyler is locked in the bunker with two people he can’t really trust, so there’s every chance that the murderer was one of them, rather than a psychic phantom who can walk through walls and incinerate people with a thought. The solution is a tad more complicated that “Tyler didn’t notice one of them committing a murder with a flamethrower”, just in case you are worried about it.

It’s far more of a thriller than a mystery, with the action in Siberia, and, later, London, interspersed with a flashback to Tyler’s introduction to his espionage career in Africa with his brother, and it’s a thriller that never stops moving, often in a direction that you’re not expecting. It follows Tyler throughout so you know what he knows – mostly, he does keep some bits to himself for dramatic effect. It’s really hard, I think, to write a sympathetic lead character when they are the sort of person who can kill when necessary without really thinking about it, but Marshall does an excellent job with Tyler. The support characters, in particular the one returning from Anthrax Island, are well represented too.

All in all, this is a first-rate thriller. If you enjoyed M W Craven’s Fearless, then this book – this trilogy – should be right up your street.

77 North is out in ebook and paperback on 7th September. Many thanks to Canelo for the e-review copy via NetGalley.