Review by Booklist Review
For a half-century now we've been watching Michael Caine movies in which he shares screen time with even bigger names in the business, leaving us thinking, "That star was good, but Michael was better." During the COVID-19 lockdown, Caine took on a generation of thriller writers to create his first crime novel. The verdict? He mopped the floor with 'em. The tale begins with a tilt to Caine's cockney origins. Two mates working at a "tip," a garbage dump, in Stepney, East London, are "bangin' on" about a scary item that's turned up in the trash. Rightly so. It's fissionable material and thus of interest to cops and politicians. And, worse yet, drug lords, who see it as the ultimate way to eliminate rivals. Too bad it's disappeared. The job of recovering it before it creates "something a bit like Hiroshima" has fallen to battered but still believing detective chief inspector Harry Taylor. Caine details his efforts in an unusually vivid style; then, just when everything seems to be winding down, he delivers a jolt that makes the pages vibrate.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Academy Award winner Caine adds to his résumé with this suspenseful debut. When a metal box containing weapons-grade uranium is discovered at a dump in Stepney, England, the race is on among various London gangs to get their hands on it. Afraid of the havoc a briefcase-size nuke could wreak, New Scotland Yard assigns Harry Taylor, a 45-year-old, Kipling-quoting old-school DCI, to retrieve the material. Alongside right-hand man John Williams, sniper Iris Davies, and nuclear expert Carol Walker, Harry follows a trail of clues that takes his team from the posh Eaton Square digs of a Sondheim-loving drug lord to the Versailles-like lair of a Russian oligarch in Barbados. Along the way, Caine orchestrates plenty of shoot-outs, ambushes, and pulse-quickening standoffs. He doesn't reinvent the wheel, but he brings to the proceedings a Len Deightonesque delight in depicting interservice squabbling, an Ian Fleming--like appreciation for outsized villains, a fascination with atomic age minutiae, and tough-guy dialogue that absolutely crackles. This is the kind of well-oiled thriller that Caine made his name starring in. (Dec.)
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