'The world is changing beyond recognition. Radical extremists are rising and seek to enforce their ideology globally. Governments, the military, and intelligence agencies are being outmanoeuvred at every step. Borders are breaking down. Those in power are puppets. The old rules are obsolete. To fight this war a new doctrine is needed. In a world where nothing is as it seems, where trust is gone, one man will make the difference...'
Black 13 (2020) is the first rip-roaring, humour-flecked, white-knuckle ride novel in The Scott Pearce espionage series. We're first introduced to 'former soldier turned private detective' Nathan Foster, who has a tally of the 87 people he’s killed tattooed on his forearm, who has fallen into ‘grey, shrinking’ civilian life, and who is lulled into a thrilling investigation by a lawyer working for an anonymous client. She manages to extricate details from him about his former colleague, Scott Pearce, who is posing as a harmless 'lone foreigner' living in Railay, Thailand. Pearce is subsequently ripped from his balmy tropical island and is catapulted back to ‘crowded, polluted’ London and the UK.
We learn that Pearce was originally recruited by the Increment (‘the specialist unit that provided operational support to MI6’), but later came to serve within 'Six' itself, leaving ‘Six’, however, with his reputation besmirched. Now, in the ‘strange’ political landscape of post-Brexit Britain, Pearce and his team are up against a ‘coordinated international operation’, an insidious, far-right ‘organised and well-funded’ enemy. The various people who embody evil in Black 13 are all incalculably repellent, and this is not exactly a ‘standard operation’: ‘we have to burn the rulebook’, Pearce says, ‘and I’m going to light the fire’.
Pearce himself is ’exceptional’ and ‘formidable’, with a comforting ‘simplicity’ and ‘clarity about him’. Part English, part Sudanese, and part Egyptian, Pearce is the product of an ‘alcohol-infused cross-cultural encounter’. Whilst loathed when younger for making him different and the victim of racism, his mixed heritage is now embraced - his racial ambiguity advantages his subterfuge in adulthood. Overall, Hamdy champions unconventional ‘rough and rugged’ protagonists whose ‘inner strength’ sees them ‘through fire and pain’, ultimately ‘dragging themselves up from nothing’ with ‘dignity’. It will be interesting to see how these characters evolve in further instalments.
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