Review: The Accident Man

This book made me remember why I read - to be thrilled, to travel to dangerous places from the comfort of my chair but also to understand a little how this world works, sometimes only fiction can provide the difficult answers – bravo Mr Cain you get my standing ovation. This is the thriller of the year.

The novel starts mid-action introducing the mysterious figure Samuel Carver, who we learn is an ex-military man, British special forces if you will, employed on a contractor basis to set-up accidents for enemies of the State, people that can’t be dealt with by diplomacy and normal police methods. The novel places Carver in the centre of the action as he sabotages a helicopter owned by a East European People-smuggler and Gangster. Carver has rules, he only arranges accidents for the guilty, so he has pangs of guilt for the helicopter pilot, but his masters / handlers manage to rationalise his turmoil that what he’s doing is for the greater good.

After the successful despatch by a spectacular helicopter crash, Carver heads off to his fortress of solitude in New Zealand comforted in the knowledge that a huge sum of money has been wired to his secret bank account. We learn that his retreat in New Zealand completely cuts him off from civilisation as he uses it to escape the horrors of what he does for a living.

No sooner is Carver trying to switch off, then he is asked – no he’s told, to return to civilisation as there’s another job to do. This time he has to eliminate a middle-eastern powerbroker who’s visiting Paris with his girlfriend. Carver does not want to eliminate an innocent women in the process, but is told that the powerbroker in question is providing funding for an Islamic Terrorist Group, and that an atrocity in England is mere days away, unless Carver can provide an accident in Paris. The girlfriend will be acceptable collateral damage. Before you can hum the John Barry theme, Carver flies back from his retreat in New Zealand and heads to France. Due to the gravity of the situation, Carver rigs up the apartment with explosives if his accident miss-fires, and the accident is to follow the couple in their limousine, and cause a car-crash in an underground tunnel……sound familiar? Yes, because the mission goes to plan and the car does crash, but unknown to him a Russian hit-squad have also been sent on a high- powered motorbike but their mission is to kill Carver. Leading the mission is Russian brute Grigori Kursk accompanied by the glamorous Alix Petrova. They hadn’t reckoned on Carvers resilience because in a battle in the sewers under Paris, Carver dispatches Kursk in a slurry of explosive, or so he thinks and escapes with Petrova. In his escape, Carver kills several British agents as he realizes that he’s been set-up. The target was not a middle-eastern powerbroker and his girlfriend – as the media issues blanket coverage of the deaths of Princess Diana and her lover Dodi Fayed in the same Paris tunnel.

Carver is crushed. Everything he held to be true has been turned on its head, and he can trust no one. A hunted animal we all know is the most dangerous.

Then begins a global hunt for Carver and Petrova by Kursk’s overlords as well as the British secret service, but leading the trail is a Frenchman called Papin, an associate and freelancer who discovers their trail across Europe. Carver starts to fall for Petrova, but can he trust this eastern beauty, who in a former life worked for the Russian secret services as a ‘honey-trap’ agent? Papin asks for a cool half million from the British secret service to reveal the location of Carver and Petrova. Surely Papin has not read ‘Hannibal’ because like Thomas Harris’s Italian detective – Renaldo Pazzi, selling the whereabouts of wanted men can come with a high price.

Then the race is on with Carver enraged that he was tasked with killing the people’s princess but more importantly - why? He reveals to Alix Petrova his life, while she reveals hers, but the stories don’t hang true. The Russians and the British have their agendas which may or may not be connected, and all the while Carver brings into play his tradecraft as well his contacts and money to the battle, which gets very, very dirty.

As entertainment this is slicker than an oil-spill, but it also provokes a great deal of thought as apart from Cain’s skill as a writer, comes a knowingness that behind the closed doors that power this world, there are dark secrets, hidden agendas with people fueled with darker desires, of power, sex and control of destinies. This is one of the fastest paced thrillers I’ve read in an age. The rapidity of the action, the sensual women, the dark villains, the cutting back and fro from action sequence to action sequence had me spinning in my chair, but most of all there buried a few inches from the surface of the narrative, is a feeling for humanity, people trapped by bonds created by economics and human nature. It also harkens back to the conventions of the golden age of thrillers, and I just loved the battle across Europe, Ian Fleming style, women, the high life, but with death a mere trigger-pull away. Want to know if Carver survives? Well you’ll have to find out for yourself as the ending is a violent, cathartic and makes the experience uplifting in a surreal way.

The Accident Man, for me is one of the must reads of 2007, [or 2008 if you live in America] and for once all the publishers hype is bang on target. If you miss this book, you will miss one of the most discussed thrillers released this year. If you like James Bond, you’ll love Samuel Carver – Ali Karim

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Ali Karim - RAM

Book Review: The Accident Man