Untouchable - Softcover

Seymour, Gerald

3.99

424 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0552148164 ISBN 13: 9780552148160

Publisher: Corgi, 2002

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Albert William Packer is the supreme baron of London crime. He rules his manor with a cruel, ruthless fist. To those around him, on whatever side of the law, he is the Untouchable.

When another criminal case against him collapses, Packer turns his attention to expanding his heroin empire abroad. Where better to cut out the middle man than at the historic smuggling crossroads of Europe, the Balkans?

New men and women are drafted into the Customs & Excise unit dedicated to convicting Packer. Only one from the old team survives: the most junior, Joey Cann retained solely for his obsessional knowledge of the man who calls himself 'Mister'. When Packer leaves for Sarajevo, it is inevitable that Cann be sent after him for 'intrusive surveillance'. The brief: to bring back the evidence that will nail Packer to the wall, whatever it takes.

In London, it would have been no contest. But here on the war-torn streets of a city where justice is enforced by gangster warlords, Packer is far from home and from what he knows. Here, who will be the Untouchable, who will walk away?

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Review:

Gerald Seymour has never compromised in his avowed aim of writing richly created, ambitious and innovative thrillers that always challenge the reader's expectations. Travelling to the hot spots that are so vividly rendered in his books gives him the backgrounds he excels in, and his use of locales (such as the Balkans in this novel, The Untouchable) remains non-pareil.Here, Seymour again demonstrates his grasp of cutting-edge issues: the grim effects the drug culture is having on the world, and locating the book in Sarajevo allows Seymour to tackle the issue of the West's involvement in foreign zones of conflict when the wars finish and they fade from our memory.

The eponymous "untouchable" is Albert William Packer, known to all as Mister. A career criminal, he dispenses rough justice on his manor without mercy, punishing any opposition terminally. When a Customs and Excise case against him is torpedoed, Packer decides to expand. Buying heroin from the Turks in London's Green Lanes no longer satisfies him, so he decides to travel to Sarajevo where he plans to negotiate safe transit through the black market crossroads that is the former Yugoslavia. But he has a nemesis: Home Office Archivist Joey Cann determines to bring Packer down and follows him and his thugs to Sarajevo.

Cann initially appears to be a loser, but the inevitable confrontation between the two men in the lethal surroundings of Sarajevo changes both their lives forever. Joey Cann is a protagonist more in the le Carr� mould than Seymour's customary professional men of action, and his inexorable stripping away of Packer's sinister layers is expertly done. As always with Seymour (in such books as Holding the Zero and A Line in the Sand), the dividing line between good and evil is never clear and the moral ambiguities here are quite as satisfying as the utterly involving narrative. --Barry Forshaw

Review:

'A genuinely exciting epic...the novel has a truly memorable final chapter...entertaining' (Independent)

'A clever, informed and worldly cynical story about arrogance, obsession and tragedy' (The Times)

'The finest thriller writer in the world today' (Daily Telegraph)

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