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Chris Ryan was born in 1961 in a village near Newcastle. In 1984 he joined the SAS. During his ten years in the Regiment , he was involved in overt and covert operations and was also Sniper team commander of the anti-terrorist team. During the Gulf War, Chris was the only member of an eight-man team to escape from Iraq, of which three colleagues were killed and four captured. It was the longest escape and evasion in the history of the SAS. For this he was awarded the Military Medal. During Ryan's last two years in the Regiment he selected and trained potential SAS recruits, he left the SAS in 1994 and is now the author of many bestselling thrillers for adults, as well as the Alpha Force and Code Red series for younger readers.
Kicking off with the IRA torture and killing of two members of the British Forces Research Unit operating undercover in the brutal world of Northern Ireland's touts and terrorists, Chris Ryan's military thriller can be best summed up by the words gracing its cover - 'the body-count is rising'. The duo's unpleasant demise heralds the beginning of a series of murders of MI5 officers in England, and the evidence points to what can only be an inside job. With hardly a pause for breath, the violence switches from a grim barn somewhere near the Irish border to the jungle rescue of an ITN news crew who have been kidnapped by the alcohol- and drug-crazed PRU of Sierra Leone. And it's there, at dawn in the steaming African heat, that we are introduced to SAS Captain Alex Temple, the only man qualified to end the savage killings back home. The kind of graphic violence that would have great difficulty making it to a cinema screen accompanies Temple as he returns to team up with his new partner - MI5's Dawn Harding - to delve once again into the extremely dangerous world of intelligence and counter-intelligence. This is an action-packed adventure that does exactly what it says on the tin as it rattles along breathlessly through the murky world of 'officially deniable' activities and gung-ho machismo. On occasion, run-of-the-mill characters and some obligatory and perfunctory sexual encounters threaten to get in the way of the action, but the rollercoaster inevitably regains momentum and the pace returns to relentless. Ryan's attention to military detail and the bewildering array of organizations and weaponry betray his past as a member of the SAS, and this novel will no doubt be eagerly welcomed by the genre's many aficionados. (Kirkus UK)
