A Fatal Game - Nicholas Searle

 Nicholas Searle is the award-winning author of The Good Liar (2015).   He previously worked in British Intelligence.

A Fatal Game (2019) is about Jihadi terrorism in a large, unnamed British city.   It begins with what seems to be a suicide bombing at the railway station.   The scandal with such events is always, Where were the security services?   In this case they were watching the bomber every step of the way - he was, they thought, one of their assets.   They had checked his rucksack before he set out for what they thought was a trial run; it was full of nothing but books.   He doubtless changed it during a visit to the gents in the park.   Or was it changed without his knowledge?   Did he set it off or was it triggered remotely?   These are some of the questions to be probed in the inevitable public inquiry.   The handler, Jake Winter, is a key witness and our protagonist.

At the same time as he gives evidence from behind the ubiquitous screen, Jake is continuing his day job.   This includes handling Rashid, a former Jihadi who has now been recruited for another planned bombing, this time at the football stadium where City are to face European opposition.   A trial run will take place on the Sunday before the midweek match, when City will play Liverpool.

Jake, a New Zealander with a Maori father, is of course a loner.   He shops in the convenience store owned by the father of one of the station victims.   His superiors in London understandably want him removed from the upcoming op.   How will it look if his trusted CHIS turns out to be unreliable, if the reheardal turns out to be, again, the real thing?   But Jake's local manager trusts him.

We follow the build-up to match-day.   Searle gives us multiple viewpoints, down to the individual would-be terrorists and one of the armed police whose task it will be to tail Rashid to the stadium and, if need be, hard-stop him.   This fractured tachnique pays off in the set-piece finale.

Searle has a winning style.   His characters are all conflicted, all well defined.   There is never a problem knowing whose point of view we are experiencing.   His prose is very effective: technical where need be, literary enough to keep the brain engaged while never slowing down the plot.   In many ways his great achievement as a contemporary author is to keep the book down to a traditional 250 pages.   The temptation, in the era of word-processing software, is to sprawl, which Searle never does.

The very end of the book - the climax of the finale - is thought provoking.   Is it enough?   I suppose some people will think it insufficiently conclusive.   Is conclusive better?   I thought about it long and hard.   My conclusion?   This is Searle's decision.   He chose to leave it there.   The alternative would be to tie up all loose ends.   And that would definitely have been too much.   It is, after all, the point of the structure Searle has given us: the repercussions of these events never fully end.