The Dealer and the Dead

Starred review from December 9, 2013
A war crime propels this stellar thriller from Edgar-finalist Seymour (Harry’s Game). One night during the Balkan conflict of the early 1990s, four Croat fighters crouch in a cornfield outside the town of Vukovar in eastern Slavonia as they wait for a shipment of arms that will enable them to fight off their Serb attackers. The arms never come, they are killed, and the town is almost destroyed. In the present, the name of the man who reneged on the arms deal, Harvey Gillot, has become synonymous in the history of the town with all that is evil. Various people have business with the successful, wealthy Gillot, including Robbie Cairns, a young hit man in a London crime family; Det. Sgt. Mark Roscoe with the Serious Crime Directorate; Megs Behan, a researcher for the antigovernment organization Planet Protection; Penny Laing, a member of HM Revenue and Customs Alpha team; and a retired Secret Intelligence Service officer, flamboyant Benjamin Arbuthnot. How Seymour develops these characters and manipulates them until they all end up in Vukovar is a testament to his talent and skill. Agent: Jonathan Lloyd, Curtis Brown (U.K.).

January 15, 2014
In 1991, Croatian villagers pooled together their worldly goods to buy weapons to use against advancing Serb forces, only to be left defenseless by a shadowy arms dealer who took the money and ran. Nearly 20 years later, survivors of the brutal attack discover his identity and pay to have him killed to avenge the deaths. Harvey Gillot, the still-active, internationally successful arms dealer, regards this betrayal as the only blot on his record. But it increasingly haunts him. When he learns his life is at risk, he goes underground, moving his family to a remote, southern part of England. In spite of his efforts to disappear, he is pursued not only by a young London hit man struggling to live up to crime family standards, but also a police detective, a customs agent, an NGO arms monitor and a retired intelligence officer. Arms dealing, we learn, is not illegal under British law if certain conditions are met. The morality of moving weapons to various parts of the world is not so easily resolved. Seymour's 25th novel, published in England in 2010, has its share of nail-biting moments, gaining intensity down the stretch. But it largely eschews action scenes in favor of a simmering, multilayered account of the past catching up to the present. Gillot is in a classic melancholic mode; readers who like more adrenalized thrillers might do better to look elsewhere. Those who are drawn to densely woven, slowly unfolding plots and thoughtful writing will rate this book a winner. Decades after establishing himself as a master of British spy fiction with Harry's Game, Seymour shows no signs of slowing down or losing relevance.

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Starred review from January 1, 2014
Seymour (A Deniable Death, 2013) tells the story of a tiny Croatian village whose inhabitants held out for weeks against a much larger, better-armed force of Serbian paramilitaries during the Bosnian War. The villagers knew survival depended on getting antitank rockets, and they pooled everything they owned to buy them from an arms merchant. But the weapons were never delivered, and the Serbs committed atrocities that survivors have been waiting two decades to avenge. They learn the name of the arms dealer who betrayed them. Once again, they pool everything they own, this time to hire a hit man. Seymour loves detail, and The Dealer and the Dead serves it up brilliantly. He takes readers inside the minds and lives of a baker's dozen characters, from villagers and the British arms merchant to a London cop whose Flying Squad is tasked with stopping contract killings, to a driven woman who tracks the international arms trade for an NGO, and a forensic scientist who has been unearthing Croatian victims for 20 years. The Bosnian conflict was spectacularly cruel. Two decades on, it continues to spur headlines and to provide potent plotlines for novelists. It's fitting that Seymour, one of the finest contemporary espionage novelists, shines his unique light on it.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)