#BlogTour #BookReview The Coming Darkness by Greg Mosse

Welcome to today’s stop on the blog tour for The Coming Darkness by Greg Mosse which is published tomorrow. My thanks to Sofia at Midas PR for inviting me to take part in the tour and to Moonflower Books for my proof copy. Do check out the reviews by my tour buddies for today, Jo at JaffaReadsToo and Jackie at Jackie’s Reading Corner.

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About the Book

Paris, 2037. Alexandre Lamarque of the French external security service is hunting for eco-terrorists. Experience has taught him there is no one he can trust – not his secretive lover Mariam, not even his old mentor, Professor Fayard, the man at the centre of the web. He is ready to give up. But he can’t.

In search of the truth, Alex must follow the trail through an ominous spiral of events, from a string of brutal child murders to a chaotic coup in North Africa. He rapidly finds himself in a heart-thumping race against chaos and destruction. He could be the world’s only hope of preventing THE COMING DARKNESS…

Format: Hardback (390 pages)              Publisher: Moonflower Books
Publication date: 10th November 2022 Genre: Thriller

Find The Coming Darkness on Goodreads

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My Review

The Coming Darkness is set just far enough in the future for things to feel different – the use of advanced technology such as holoscreens and comm-watches – but just close enough to be scary. There’s a dystopian feel to the world we’re introduced to, a world in which surveillence cameras are everywhere, some parents have their children micro-chipped in order to keep tabs on them and there are nightly curfews in some cities. Actually, maybe apocalyptic is a better description. It’s a glimpse into a future where environmental degradation has caused desertification of some areas of the world, resulting in poverty, mass migration and inequality. Add to this the threat of deadly transgenic viruses and you have the stuff of nightmares.

Trying to bring some order to this disordered world is Alexandre Lamarque, a government agent who has becoming increasingly disillusioned with the actions he is asked to carry out. (Like Van Der Valk of the 1970s crime series, he lives on a boat.) But Alex possesses an unique intuitive ability that means his bosses don’t want to let him go. ‘The young man had a kind of sixth sense, an ability to envision possible futures, like a chess Grandmaster anticipating countless iterations of cause and effect.’ Alex can sense that ‘something’ is coming – an absence, a darkness – but he doesn’t know quite what it is, when it will happen or from where it will come.  The thrill of the book is accompanying Alex on the journey to find out. In the process, he will come up against those who embrace a twisted, destructive and nihilistic ideology, and wonder if there’s anyone he can truly rely on.

The short chapters keep the pace and the tension high. The occasional switches to events involving other, sometimes unnamed, characters keep the reader guessing. And there are some terrific action scenes, such as the extraction of an influential political figure from a sealed compound during an attempted coup, that have a real cinematic quality. I also loved that in this high-tech future some of the key breakthroughs depend on the use of ‘outdated’ analogue technology and there’s still a role for an ejector seat.

According to his author biography, Greg has long had an ambition to write ‘a powerful thriller’. Well, it’s job done as far as I’m concerned because The Coming Darkness has everything I look for in a political thriller: interesting characters, an intricate plot, a constant sense of jeopardy and plenty of surprises. And is that a tantalising suggestion at the end of the book that there could be a follow-up? I do hope so.

In three words: Clever, fast-paced, compelling

Try something similar: Sleep When You’re Dead by Jude O’Reilly

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About the Author

Greg’s first career was in theatre as an actor, director and writer. He has lived and worked in Paris, New York, Los Angeles and Madrid, mostly as a translator and interpreter for a variety of international organisations. In 2015 he returned to theatre, writing and producing 25 plays and musicals, plus four short films. He took advantage of 2020’s lockdown to fulfil a long-term ambition to sit quietly and write a powerful thriller. (Photo: Twitter profile)

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