I always find Mike Ripley's books a pleasure to read as they suit my own predilection for hard-boiled. This book may be regarded as super hard-boiled but there is plenty of irreverent wit woven into the dialogue, as well as the little narrative and prose there is.

In essence, the plot revolves around a caper to rob some goodies from the cargo warehouses at Heathrow and how a variety of badly planned or badly executed manoeuvres spin towards a conclusion which is not altogether expected. Told from the perspective of goodies and baddies, there are scams within the scams and twists and turns all along. But somehow, it falls a bit short of the standards of the earlier Angel series. It struck me that this tale needed some more fleshing out - even hard-boiled characters have a thought process.

The ending when it comes is very sudden. So sudden that the book is filled out by the second half being Mike's film script of the story just told. All very well if Mike's books had a history of being snapped up by movie producers and turned into cinematic glory - if that were the case (and as far as I know it isn't), then a master class would be at hand. Unfortunately, I don't think it is.

So this reviewer who has loved Mike Ripley's previous offerings was left a bit deflated by this one. Perhaps Mike's publisher took a more optimistic view as his name has been given to one of the central characters. I suspect this will not be a best seller.