I bought up this book for no other reason than I had an hour to kill, and nothing to read, so I thought I might as well get a new book to start reading.

I'd never come across Gerald Seymour before, but from the blurb on the back, I got the impression that the book was some kind of crime/action thriller, which I'd say was a pretty fair assessment.

It begins quite slowly, setting the scene and introducing the characters. The main character, Malachy Kitchen (nice name) seems a little difficult to like at first, but you soon start to get hints of his troubled past (which the blurb on the back has told you about anyway).

His troubled past is as an army officer in Iraq, where he is accused of cowardice in the face of the enemy. He leaves the army and sinks. By the time we encounter him at the start of the book, he is living on the streets. Soon Malachy is given somewhere to live - a flat in a tower block on a virtually lawless estate where the residents are in fear of the drug users and pushers, where he continued to reject completely any contact with society, save for an infrequent cup of tea shared with his elderly neighbour.

When his elderly neighbour is mugged by a drug user and ends up in hospital, this presents an opportunity for Malachy to climb back on the ladder towards self-respect, and he begins his crusade…

There is a lot of changing between different characters who are introduced. This has both advantages and disadvantages: the advantage is that the characters who Malachy (and others) encounter are fully rounded and fleshed out and you understand their motives; the disadvantage is that it makes the narrative flow a little jumpy.

That's a minor quibble though, as the narrative that is there is clear and understandable for all of the characters. After a slow, building start, the action builds up and there's some good use of narrative tension: one encounter builds up and you're trying to guess what is being planned and then it cuts to the aftermath of what's happened.

It sounds out, but it's almost as if the writer has an eye for cinematography: the way in which this is done would work perfectly in a film and - perhaps surprisingly - works very well in a book too. In some respects it was slightly disappointing because you could see what the writer was capable, and some passages were exquisitely well written, but in some others I found my attention drifting away, and that's not a good sign.

At 576 pages, I think that the book could probably have been made tighter, and I felt the story would have been better served without the tying up of loose ends after the climax, as I felt by that point it just felt that the narrative was winding down and the author was looking for a way out.

I can't say it's the best book I've ever read, but it didn't get interrupted by any other books - and as I've normally got about three on the go at any one time, that's pretty good going. If you like action/crime thrillers, you'll probably like it. If you don't, you probably won't.